Month: July 2016

Ven. Song-chol : Universal law is that there is no producing and no extinguishing. So by transcending time and space, there is nothing to appear and disappear, including life.
In the Avatamsaka Sutra we find, “The One Law is nonproducing, the one Law is non-extinguishing”; and from the Lotus Sutra we have, “All Dharma is that of non-change.”
We call this non-producing, non-extinguishing by various names―the ultimate, the absolute, the Dharma realm, causality, the eternally abiding, Dharmadhuta, Dharma nature. There are a thousand different names, but the meanings are all the same. They all are the basis of the universe and the basis of the Supreme Enlightenment by the Buddha who saw that all was non-producing, non-extinguishing.
This Truth is so profound, so deep, so difficult to comprehend that it can be seen only by the Wisdom Eye of the Buddha; and it cannot be found in any other religion, philosophy or thought system. Modern science is now beginning to come close to a similar explanation, which helps to make the Buddha’s Teachings a bit more comprehensible to modern man. So it will be interesting to see what else science comes up with in the future, although scientific findings in no way influence the Teachings.
In this non-producing, non-extinguishing of the eternally abiding Dharma, there is only unlimited causation where increasing and decreasing and coming and going are non-existent. This is the nature of reality. To put it in more modern terms, the volume does not change; but due to unlimited causation, the influence of eyerything on all things and all things on everything, the apparent containers do.
The nature of all forms of life is the same, matter and mind are one, and there is no distinction between the animate and the inanimate. So “life” is a term that is given to both the animate and the inanimate. And you must be able to listen to the Dharma talk of the inanimate to really know the meaning of life: the totality of all forms of life is absolute, and there is no producing or extinguishing, no coming and going of it.
It may seem a bit progressive to call that which is inanimate “life” but not only the animate moves. Inanimate life, too, is just as filled with molecules with their own movement, their own spin. You must realize that all things, even a staid boulder, are actually in constant motion.
Ten billion Sakyamunis are dancing on the end of a spring breeze.Q: Is the Buddhist ideal to deal with the existing or to transcend the existing?

Ven. Song-chol : In Buddhism, “producing and extinguishing” is the Bhutatathata or ultimate reality. That is to say, present reality is absolute, torment and suffering are enlightenment, and sentient beings are Buddha. Fundamentality, humanity is absolute, and it both transcends and includes oneness. So there is nothing more to transcend.
You see, the Buddha came to teach us that we already are Buddha, not that we have to become Buddha. Think of it as having gold, but mistaking it for loess. You can mistake it for loess as long as you want, but that doesn’t change the nature of the gold. All you have to do is rid yourself of the delusions that the gold is loess. The gold remains as it is.
In the same way, through our delusions we mistake real Buddhas for sentient beings; and even though we behave as sentient beings, our fundamental Buddha nature remains the same. So we don’t have to go looking for Buddha. We just have to rid ourselves of delusions.
Sentient beings are Buddha, this world of suffering is a Buddafield, and present reality is absolute. We must eliminate our conditioned views and biases, stop living like someone in the hot summer who has no vision of winter ice, and awaken ourselves to our Buddha nature.
A person above vairocana`s torehead is standing at the center of an intersection.Q: What do you mean by the term “restore humanity”?

Ven. Song-chol : Humanity both transcends oneness and includes oneness, and it is absolute. This is called “original Buddha.” But as sentient beings we mistake this original Buddha, call ourselves sentient beings, and behave like sentient beings. “To restore humanity” is to rid ourselves of these delusions and to confirm our fundamental nature, our original face.
We have mistaken pure gold for loess, so we must become awakened to the fact that we are pure gold. There is nothing else. It’s like a facial mirror covered with dust―the dust prevents it from reflecting. So all we have to do is to clean off the mirror, and it will reflect perfectly. There’s no need to go out and get a new mirror.
In Buddhism, one must make a searching examination of the dust covering the mirror of the mind, and remove every single spot of it. This is the proper function of recovering our humanity. In order to do so, we must completely eliminate all of the dust from both present consciousness and from the absolute consciousness, the Alayavijnana. Then we can clearly see our original nature, our fundamental nature, our Buddha nature.
Smash not just the mirror, but the blue sky as well, and come to see me.Q: Can the solution to the human predicament be found in religion?

Ven. Song-chol : It seems that most religions move from the mortal to the immortal and from the relative to the absolute. In Buddhism, however, the mortal is the immortal and the relative is the absolute.
Many other religions claim that there is an absolute which is separate from present reality, and their goal is to go from the present world of mortality and limited reality to that separate, absolute, immortal reality.
But in Buddhism, the present is the absolute and we are living in the world of the eternal. There is no need to look elsewhere.
So the problem becomes one of not mistaking the absolute for the relative. What we call the relative is at the same time the absolute. If you realize this, you will come to realize that everything is the absolute, and that everything is already “delivered.” Only then will we be able to solve the problems of humanity.
The sun is high in the sky, but people are walking around with their eyes closed complaining about the darkness. We have to open our Eye to see that we are living in this glorious light. We must rid ourselves of our delusions to realize that we are already eternal in this Great Light.
A Buddha does not have to look for anything.
So what is this we call sentient beings?

Q: In this age of insecurity, how can people overcome their restlessness?

Ven. Song chol : The Great Tranquil Light flows gloriously and completely through eyerything, so in Buddhism we have no room for such concepts as “insecurity” “restlessness” “wandering.” The Great way is wider than the universe itself and brighter than thousands of suns. So nothing should upset you, not even the end of the world.
To talk of life and death, to talk of “salvation” is to be talking in your sleep. “Buddha” and “enlightenment” are just more dust on the mirror. Just look at the fundamental Great Light!
The tips of the willows are green, and the peach blossoms
are spotted with pink.Q: What are your thoughts on greed and materialism?

Ven. Song-chol : Non-personal greed, that is greed for the common good, and materialism for the common good are the most priceless of jewels.
No living thing wishes to live in misery. But we must go beyond personal greed. National programs for development are good; but we have to go beyond the limited sphere of humanity, and put greed and materialism to work for the benefit of all that lives. Only then are greed and materialism jewels of any worth.
Personal greed is but poison to the heart. You must forget yourself and work for the benefit of all that lives. That has always been the fundamental wish of all Buddhas and the Great path of the Bodhisattvas. And it should be the basic approach to life for all Buddhists.Q: Can Buddhism save society?

Ven. Song-chol : The word “save” doesn’t apply to Buddhism. Since all forms of life are absolute, all forms of life are Buddha. The prime prerequisite for becoming a Buddhist is to respect all forms of life in the same way that one should respect his parents. One should serve all forms of life the same way one should serve elders. So you see, there is only serving―no “saving” no “salvation.”
I have said repeatedly that helping other forms of life is the only true Buddhist offering. Usually when people talk about helping others, they think of the rich giving to the poor, and so on. This, however, in the Buddhist sense, is not really the proper attitude. The proper attitude is to treat all forms of life with the same gentleness as one would treat an ailing parent, as one would provide a meal to a hungry teacher, as one would offer clothing to a Buddha wearing rags.
“Rescuing” implies something quite different. It’s feeling sorry, selectively, for the weak and the poor. This is, in effect, an enormous insult to those people. Wherever you go there are hungry Buddhas, there are ragged Buddhas, there are ailing Buddhas, there are bag Buddhas. The Buddhist teaching is to treat everyone as one would treat one’s parents, in the same way a Buddhist honors the Buddha. So there is only non-selective reverence and service―no “rescuing.”
A lion doesn’t howl like a wolf.Q: What does Korean Buddhism have to do during the 1980’s?

Ven. Song-chol : There is only one uniform truth in Buddhism, and it applies to everything in the universe. It does not apply to any one geographical area, nor to any one generation. One acts according to basic Buddhist mentality regardless of time and place.
So where and when one lives is irrelevant. One always reveres all forms of life as Buddha. While espousing the absolute nature of all that lives, one eliminates personal desires and dedicates oneself completely to serving all living Buddhas. That’s all. There’s nothing else to do.
A thousand eons may pass but they are not past. Ten thousand ages pass by, yet everything is now.Q: Is there anything you’d like to convey to monks and nuns who are in training?

Ven. Song-chol : Just let me say that we think that the planet earth is a large place, but it’s an invisible speck of dust compared to the universe. And this huge, immense universe is but a drop of water in the ocean compared to the Bhutatathata, the Dharma realm. And the activity of this universe is but one drop of toam in comparison to the Great Ocean. If all the Buddhas of the universe appeared at once to expound upon this, they could spend the rest of eternity explaining; yet all their talk would be but a peep in the endless Dharma realm.
All forms of life are one in this inexplicably priceless realm. So we must rid ourselves of those hollow dreams of personal fame and fortune, open this inexhaustible treasure house, and work for the benefit of all. To covet a single grain of rice is to lose 10,000 eons of food.
Think again about the example set by Shun-ch’ih, conqueror of all of China and founder of the Ch’ing Dynasty. He finally considered all of his worldly conquests and riches nothing but debauchery and cast them all aside to enter the path. So I ask all who have joined the order to devote total efforts to attaining the Great Enlightenment.
Deep in the mountains in the middle of a bright, moonlit night, an owl hoots.

Sentient beings have not achieved enlightenment because of their myriad delusions, often referred to as the 84,000 delusions. And what are the most basic of these delusions? The Buddha said that love and hate were the greatest delusions of them all. Also, the Third Patriarch of Ch’an, Seng-ts’an, in his On Believing in Mind, said that if you rid yourself of hate and love, everything would be perfectly self-illuminating.
And in fact, if you can rid yourself of hate completely, then you can easily achieve pure Mind, the Supreme Enlightenment. But before then, hate continues to arise in the mind, and hate is indeed a disease that is hard to cure.
As Buddhists who set our standards by the Teachings of the Buddha, we must do our best to eliminate hate from our lives, from our actions, from our hearts. It is difficult to practice the advice of the Buddha to treat even the bitterest of enemies as our parents. But we must try.
Nowadays we hear a lot about “forgive evil” and “love your enemy”; but only the Buddha could have made such a statement as, “Revere your enemies as you revere your parents.”
You should understand that in Buddhism there is no such thing as “forgiveness.” To forgive implies that you are right and the other person is wrong. So to say that you will “forgive” somebody is a tremendous insult to that person. And you are not assuming any responsibility for what has happened to you.
Buddhism teaches that all sentient beings have the same Buddha nature. An enlightened Buddha sitting high on a lotus pedestal and those beings writhing in the torments of a hell are, in fundamental reality, the same. So no matter how wicked a person has been, no matter how much you dislike or criticize a person, you cannot, at least according to Buddhist thought, “forgive” him for something he did to you.
Well, then, what are you supposed to do?
No matter what a person has done, you should respect him like a Buddha. This is the very essence of Buddhism. The Buddha’s cousin Devadattaa harassed the Buddha throughout his life. And finally Devadatta was put through a living hell. He was put through this as an expedient to protect other people from his wiles. But How was the Buddha supposed to treat Devadatta, his own cousin but his greatest of enemies? He rewarded him with Supreme Enlightenment.
In Buddhism, we say that the entire universe is filled with the brilliance of evil and goodness. You may not understand this at first. One gentle deed lights up the entire universe which I think you’ll find acceptable even if you don’t understand it. But can you understand and accept that an evil act done by sentient beings in hell also lights up the entire universe?
Usually we think of the Buddha as the gentlest of the gentle, and devils as wicked. We conceive the Buddha and devils as different as day and night, as different as heaven and earth. But actually the devils and the Buddha are of the same body, they are one, and they differ only in name. They are all Buddha.
A person may do something utterly horrible, but that person’s basic nature, his original face remains the same. And So it is with someone who has become enlightened―his fundamental nature remains the same. Every sentient being is of the same Buddha nature, the same body. We are all just different manifestations of the same thing.
Devadatta was evil, and wicked, and scheming. But because his basic nature was exactly the same as the Buddhas, the Buddha repaid Devadatta’s wicked deeds with future enlightenment. He did this so that Devadatta would lead sentient beings rather than harm them. It is this type of response that is basic to Buddhist thought.
This very important quote―”Revere your enemies as you revere your parents―should be the basis of your daily life, your actions and your study. Your first basic guide to life as a Buddhist is to respect all forms of life as the Buddha and to revere them as your teachers. All forms of life―the gentle and the wicked, cows, pigs, and beasts of all kinds―have the exact same Buddha nature, so you should respect them just as you respect the Buddha. And each one has something to teach you if you look closely enough. So don’t judge a person by his clothing or appearance. You should look beyond those things to the person and his Buddha nature.
Centuries ago there was a national celebration, and all the senior monks in Korea were invited. Among the monks was one who lived an exceedingly frugal life. When he showed up at the palace gates in his tattered robes and wom-out shoes, the guards wouldn’t let him in, and shooed him away. So the monk went somewhere nearby, borrowed some fancy new robes and returned. The guards started kowtowing left and right, and ushered him to the most honored seat in the room.
While the other monks were busy gorging themselves on all kinds of delicacies, this monk kept smearing the food onto his clothes. The other monks, startled, asked him why he was doing so. He replied, “Because the food is for the clothes, not for me,” and he kept it up until his robes were covered completely.
The point is, of course, that you shouldn’t treat people according to their appearance, according to what you see on the outside. There may be some of you here who are thinking to yourselves, “Well, that’s easy for him to say, and something that only the Buddha could do; but we have to live with people who expect to be treated according to their ‘packaging.'” That, however, is not necessarily the case.
There’s a story about the aristocratic Kwak clan from Hyonp’ung in Kyongsang Province. One of the Kwak’s got married, but his new brides behavior was less than becoming to the family’s social status. She dressed sloppily, she wasn’t particularly polite to his parents, and she talked disrespectfully. The family tried everything they could to get her to behave properly, but nothing worked.
One day, the groom was reading the Confucian classics and he came across the quote that said that people were inherently gentle and good, even though they may not always behave that way. This changed the groom’s attitude completely. He realized that his brides behavior was probably all his fault, so he made up his mind to treat his wife more respectfully because, as a human, her basic nature was gentle and good.
In the old days, aristocrats began the day by going to the study and bowing to their ancestors. The next morning, after the husband had performed this ritual in full dress, he turned and bowed to his wife. At first she thought that he had gone mad. The same person who cursed her and beat her was now bowing before her!
He said to her, simply, “I sincerely respect you,” and bowed again. Flustered by all of this, she tried to make him leave, but he kept on bowing. Then he said, “Human nature is basically gentle and good. You are gentle and good. But because I was busy mistreating you, I didn’t see that. From now on I will look only at the good in you, and respect you.”
It didn’t take long before the bride completely changed her behavior but she continued to implore her husband.
“I won’t misbehave any more, so please stop your bowing!”
“You are so gentle, I can’t help but bow to you.”
“No, no, no. You are the one who is really good and gentle,” she replied. From then on they bowed to each other every morning, and spent the rest of their lives in mutual admiration, respect and happiness. So you see, the Buddha wasn’t the only one who was capable of respecting everyone. It’s something anyone can do, and something all Buddhists should do. And it has great results.
When the Chinese monk I-ching1 traveled to India, he observed that the monks at every temple recited Matrcheta’s Hymn in One-Hundred Fifty Verses at both morning and evening services. We find in the records of his travels to the south sea2 quotes from these verses:

We have become enemies by betraying his infinite grace;
But Buddha sees this as the greatest benevolence of all.

In other words, even if you treat someone better than your own parents and better than you would treat the Buddha, and this person in turn hurts you or betrays you, you should revere him even more. The verses continue:

If enemies harm the Buddha, he still only reveres them. The enemies look only at his faults; yet the Buddha treats them with benevolence.

So if you treat someone really well and this person only harms you in return, you should still revere this person. And you should revere most the person who harms you the most. This is a basic Teaching, and a basic attitude in Buddhism.
As I may have mentioned once before, when Christians come to see me I have them perform 3,000 prostrations just like everyone else. But I set the condition that as they do their prostrations, they must pray that those who refute their God and those who curse Jesus will be the first ones to go to their heaven. Think of that in our terms now: we should pray that those who curse Buddha and attack the monks be the first to go to paradise.
The Buddha said that only by revering all enemies will delusions and poiso ns of the mind disappear. If these all disappear, then we will all become Buddhas, we will all attain enlightenment. And just as we Buddhists set enlightenment as our goal, we should live a life practicing what we have been taught by the Buddha. But you cannot do this as long as your reactions are based on your fleeting emotions.
Some of you may be wondering about how to respond to the challenge Christianity has presented to Buddhism in Korea in recent years. You may think that if we don’t respond, eventually Buddhism will be wiped out. You think that if someone screams at you once, you should respond with ten screams and then he’ll run away. You want to do something about it.
It’s easy to think that way, but that is not right. The greater this challenge becomes, the more you should bow for and pray for these people. That is the Buddhist way, and that is how you should live. And if you do so, others will be impressed by your example, and they will be impressed by Buddhism.
If one person shouts, the other should be silent. If one person raises his fist, the other should not. If one person sets a fire, should you set a fire, too? Then you will only burn together. If one person brings a torch, no matter how big, all you have to do is to use water wisely. There is no way that fire can conquer water. Fighting fire with fire results only in more scorched earth.
So the basic attitude you must adopt in all facets of your life is to treat your enemies with the reverence and respect that you afford your own parents.
Buddha nature is pure, spotless. It knows neither form nor formlessness, and it is complete enlightenment. No matter how tattered a persons clothing is, the person is sacred. His real nature is Buddha nature. Revere the precious and the lowly, the old and the young as you revere the Buddha, and revere even the greatest of criminals for his Buddha nature. Treat all, including your greatest enemy, with reverence. And the greater the enemy, the greater the respect and reverence you should have. This is the Buddhist way, and it should be your standard for all behavior. Then, and only then are you really qualified to enter the Buddha Hall.

The pure Mind is Buddha, the brilliant Mind is the Dharma, and the inexhaustibly pure, bright and free-flowing Mind is the Sangha.

These are the words of Master Lin-chi, founder of the Lin-chi Ch’an school. And indeed to become an enlightened person, one has to have a pure Mind and a brilliant Mind, and one has to be inexhaustibly free-flowing, and pure.
How pure and clean and clear is such a Mind, though? Incomparably purer and cleaner and clearer than a cloudless sky. There is an old saying that to call a cloudless sky clear and pure is to warrant a beating with a mallet. In comparison to a truly pure Mind, a clear sky is filth.
We can make a comparison of this Mind with a perfectly clear mirror, but that, too, is an insufficient comparison, although it is frequently used in Buddhism. A monk once said, “Smash your mirror and come so that we may look at each other.”
How clear and pure and clean does one’s Mind have to be to meet the Buddhist requirements of a pure Mind? Even at the stage of Universal Enlightenment, one does not have a pure, clear Mind. Although at that stage all major delusions have been removed, tiny delusions still remain in the Alayavijnana, even without one’s knowing it. So to reach the state of perfect purity and clarity, one must eliminate all delusions including the basic ignorance found in the Alayavijnana. Then and only then is your Mind cleaner than a cloudless sky and a spotless mirror.
This is something that has to be experienced to be understood. Our Ch’an predecessors referred to this state as a “line-up of a thousand suns.” Not one, two, three or several suns, but a thousand! And even that number is inadequate to express the brilliance! It is something so brilliant that it is completeiy beyond description. If all the Buddhas throughout the universe tried to explain this brilliance for the rest of eternity, they couldn’t. It is Truth beyond description, brilliance beyond description.
The purity and clarity of it, too, are inexhaustible, and they are inseparable from it. Where there is fire there is light, and where there is light there is fire. Think of the purity and clarity of the light as the fire, and the brilliance as the light itself. The light is the fire and the fire is the light. There is no light without fire, and no fire without light. So they are inexhaustibly one and the same. When Hui-neng spoke of it, he made this comparison of purity and brilliance to fire and light. And we call this light the “pure, inexhaustible brilliance.”
Think of the Buddha then as the purity, the Dharma as the brilliance, and the Sangha as inexhaustibly pure and bright. These are the Three Jewels of Buddhism, and yet they are inseparable. To put it in the analogy we were using, the Buddha is the fire, the Dharma is the light; but fire is light, and light is fire. The Three Jewels―Buddha, Dharma and Sangha―are one in purity, brilliance and inexhaustibility. In Buddhism, we say that all three are one and that each one is all three.
If you come to this understanding fully, then at the same time you rid yourself of constraints, you are free-flowing and you have achieved complete liberation. But where do these constraints that we have come from? They all come from our delusions. Even with Wisdom’s Eye closed, we think that we are free, but we are not free at all. We are completely free only when we have achieved the state of No Mind, when we have seen the brilliance, when we have rid ourselves completely of all delusions.
But what freedom does a blind person have? If he goes this way, he stumbles; if he moves that way, he falls. He has no freedom. But to open his eyes is to have complete freedom.
So some people wonder why I would call you blind. You can see huge mountains, you can see tiny specks of dust. Blind?
To become enlightened is like waking from a deep dream. When you are dreaming, it seems that you are moving about in your dreams quite freely. But usually you don’t know that you’re dreaming. You have to first wake up, and then recall moving about in the dream to realize that you were dreaming. We’re talking about the same thing here. You’re living in this world, but you don’t realize that you’re dreaming. You have to awaken from this dream to realize that you have been dreaming all along.
Just as a person who doesn’t wake from a dream doesn’t realize he’s dreaming, a person who hasn’t opened the Eye finds it difficult to understand that he’s blind. Chuang-zu once said that it takes a great awakening to realize that you have been having a big dream.
This world of delusion is one big dream. And even a Bodhisattva who has achieved Universal Enlightenment should realize that he is still dreaming. Only when all remaining elements of ignorance in the Alayavijnana are swept away does one awaken from this dream. Then, and only then, do you see your true Buddha nature.
You are not an awakened person, you are not a free-flowing person before this Supreme Enlightenment. The freedom that people talk about is freedom in a dream; but only a fully enlightened person is truly free. How can you call freedom in a dream true freedom? There is a great difference between dream and reality. An enlightened being, a Buddha, a free being is one who has fully awakened, one who has experienced No Mind, one who has seen the great brilliance. Only such a being is truly free-flowing. And once a person becomes that free-flowing being, he has no need for the Buddha, no need for the predecessors, no need for the Tripitaka. Terms like “Buddha” and “predecessor” are merely medicine to help you wake from your dream. Our disease is this dreaming, and once we are cured we have no need for medicine. Medicine is for the ill, not for the cured.
“You have your own way to go, so why do you follow others?” This one sentence illustrates the true freedom of Buddhism.

The Buddhist Taboo
Let’s talk about religion for a moment. There are all kinds of religions, but it seems that most major religions on this planet argue for a transcendental god and demand subservience to their particular transcendental god with comparatively little regard to the world of sentient beings. They continually submit to the will of their god. And then they claim that after they die they will go to live with this god or that god. They serve their transcendental god without a bit of freedom for themselves. Eyery movement is a submission to the will of their particular god, and these people spend their entire lives this way.
My point here is not to criticize other religious tenets, but to illustrate the uniqueness of Buddhism. Such a subservient type of thinking is exceedingly strange to Buddhism. You see, the Buddhist premise is that we all have Buddha nature. Our fundamental nature is clearer and purer than a line-up of a thousand suns, a nature that has no room for Buddha, for predecessors, for anyone else. In this pure mind, Buddha is dirt and the predecessors are dirt. And so is the Tripitaka.
In this realm of Supreme Enlightenment, one is not under the control of Buddha or the predecessors or anything else. It is the state of total, perfect freedom. It is inexhaustibly free-flowing. There are no restraints. In such a state, how is it even possible to be controlled or restrained by some outside force? If you are everything, there cannot be anything outside of you to control you. Yes, Buddhism, too, has a taboo―control, restraint, subservience, enslavement to an outside force. Because, in Buddhism, there can be no outside force. And to reach this state of Supreme Enlightenment is to reach this state of total freedom, to be unrestrained, uncontrolled by anyone or anything. It is at the same time complete liberation, Buddhahood, nirvana.
During the last century or so, people have been talking more and more about human freedom and equality. But in order to be truly and totally free, you must experience the state of No Mind for yourself. You must experience and confirm the tranquillity, the brilliance, the inexhaustibility, and the completely unrestrained flowing freedom of it for yourself. This is what Buddhism is all about. But if you are tied to this or tied to that, if you are unconditionally subservient, how can you ever know this one and only great Truth?
Humanity is already liberated, already “delivered.” But because of delusion, man has become imprisoned in a variety of ways. If you completely sever these delusions, however, and experience this still, pure Mind, then you are truly free and you will have become the Buddha’s very first words: “I alone am supreme in this universe”―because you are the universe. So when you make the ultimate breakthrough to Supreme Enlightenment, then you are inexhaustibly, universally free-flowing. And this is the very purpose, the very goal of Buddhism.
In The Awakening of Faith, we find that this Supreme Enlightenment can take place only when you are completely free of torment. But if you are subservient in this life, then you will have the torment of being subservient in the next life. You will continue to suffer. If you sever all suffering, however, you are not constrained by the Buddha or by anything else. That is true freedom. Can you find such a concept anywhere else except in Buddhism? Your problem is, however, one of how to go about achieving this state of perfect freedom.
You must begin by abandoning Buddhism.
To believe in the Buddha and to depend on the Ch’an predecessors is to develop hitches, obstacles. You must believe in only one thing, and that is your fundamental Buddha nature, your original face. To believe that your Mind is Buddha is the correct belief, and any other belief is a false belief. That is why I constantly tell people to believe only in their Mind, and to abandon even the Tripitaka. The Buddha himself and the predecessors constantly admonished us to consider them nothing but enemies if we wish to achieve Supreme Enlightenment.
Regard the Buddha and the predecessors as enemies! Believe only in your own Mind! Your Mind is your Buddha, your Mind is your predecessor. Your Mind is paradise and your Mind is heaven. Eliminate your Mind, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing. “Buddha” and “predecessor” are but sounds from a dream. Regard the Buddha and the predecessors as your enemies! Is there anything else to say?
A person once came to me who was studying Christianity but who had run into a stone wall in his study. He could make no further progress at the time, so he came to me to try Zen meditation. We discussed this and that, and I finally said to him, “lf you wish to resolve the basic problem, you must meditate, but there is one condition.”
“A condition?”
“Yes. When monks enter the Zen meditative process, they must abandon Buddhism. Likewise, if you don’t abandon Christianity, you will never be successful in your study. You must abandon Christianity not because it is Christianity, but because it is a belief system. You must rid yourself of the constraint called Christianity just as a monl must rid himself of the constraint called Buddhism.
“Well, sunim, I’ll come back after I think it over.”
“You’re really saying that you’re not going to come back, aren’t you? Well, if you can’t abandon Chrishanity, then don’t come back. You could meditate for a hundred years, but you’d just be wasting your time.”
The pure, clear Mind knows no Buddha and it knows no predecessors. The Tripitaka would be but soil on this Mind. So you must believe that your Mind is Buddha, that there is no Dharma except for your Mind, and that there is no Buddha aside from your own Mind. Believe this thoroughly, believe it completely, and work with your koan. And if you apply yourself completely, then you will achieve true, lasting freedom, Supreme Enlightenment.
What is the point? The point is that to talk about food is useless. The issue is whether you have eaten or not. So I hope that you will take me seriously, and work diligently in your study, work diligently with your koan.
At the same time, you have to be careful. There may be some here today who think, “Well, he said to believe only in yourself. Right on! I’m thinking of having a drink―how about it?” But that is not your Mind. That is delusion, and delusion is a thief. When I talk about your Mind, I mean a pure, clear Mind, not a false Mind.
Confucius said, “At seventy, I followed my mind’s desire without stepping over the line.” If he wanted to go east, he went east; if he wanted to go west, he went west; if he wanted to sit, he sat. He did what he wanted. but all within a moral context.
Once you discover this pure, clear Mind, whatever you do is liberation, total freedorn; and whatever you do is the movement of a Buddha. You can look in all ten directions, and never find a person who drinks and makes merry with a Mind as clear as a mirror.
You must realize that. The water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is deep beyond words. And even when a typhoon strikes and the waves roll, the water remains clear. But if you look at a mud puddle and think of that as water, you’ll never realize what pure water is.
Believe that your Mind is infinitely clearer than a cloudless sky, a Mind so pure that it knows not good or evil, no Buddha, no predecessors. Awaken to your truly pure Self.

(General Dharma Lecture, Last Day of the 4th Lunar Month, 1982, Haein-sa)

Buddha is of course the foundation of Buddhism. But when you ask what Buddha is, you could get a variety of answers even though it is difficult to define in concrete terms what “Buddha” means. It is much easier to talk about the basic principles of Buddhism.
We call those who live in the world of torment and delusion sentient beings, and a Buddha is one who has completely transcended such a world. That delusion-free state, the state of supreme Enlightenment, is called “No Mind” and sometimes “No Thought.” But where exactly do we draw the line between the realms of sentient beings and the realm of no Mind?
We classify all forms of life, from the tiniest micro-organisms to Bodhisattvas at the level of universal Enlightenment, as sentient beings. Only by achieving supreme Enlightenment, by eliminating even the tiniest of delusions from the Alayavijnana, does one reach no mind, and that is when one becomes a Buddha.
We have classified all that lives in the realms of delusion as sentient beings, but how do we define delusion? Based on the Sutras, we usually talk in terms of 84,000 delusions, and we can classify these into two major groups.
First, we have the conscious delusions―a variety of thoughts rising; secondly, we have the unconscious delusions which include even the tiniest of delusions hidden deep in the unconscious. In Buddhism we have eight types of cognition, and of these the Alayavijnana, or “storehouse” is the deepest. Getting into this level is an extremely difficult task. Even a Bodhisattva at the 8th level of sainthood or an Arhat are not aware of delusions at this level. This can be known fully only by those who have achieved supreme Enlightenment, by the Buddhas.
Sentient beings, ranging from the tiniest micro-organisms to Bodhisattvas af the 7th level of sainthood, live in the realm of the conscious. Bodhisattvas above that level and those who have achieved Universal Enlightenment live in the world of the unconscious. But both of these worlds, the worlds of the conscious and the unconscious, are worlds of delusion and worlds with thought. It is only when one has gone beyond all of that, when even the tiniest delusions of the Alayavijnana have disappeared, that one reaches Supreme Enlightenment, the realm of No Mind.
What exactly is this No Mind that we are talking about? Let’s use a mirror as an analogy, since the mirror is often used in Buddhism when explaining fundamental Mind, fundamental nature, original face. Think of delusions as dust, and No Mind as the natural state of the mirror. That state―a spotless mirror―is Buddha nature, fundamental nature, original face. If you dust off the mirror, you have this natural state.
In this natural state, a mirror is indescribably clear and bright, and it reflects great light. Our fundamental nature is the same way. If all delusions are swept away, right down to the Alayavijnana, then a huge, all-pervading light appears like the sun appearing out of the clouds. And when we rid ourselves of all delusions, the light of great wisdom appears and reflects into the Dharma realm of the ten directions, the entire universe. In Buddhism we refer to this as tranquil light or brilliance. At Haein-sa, the main Buddha Hall is called “Great Tranquil Brilliance Hall,” which means a place where Buddha resides.
So this No Mind is not a state of emptiness, void, blankness or vacuity. It is this state of complete elimination of all delusion, a state of perfect, quiet brilliance. Contrary to common misunderstanding, it is not a state of abso lute thoughtlessness, like a boulder. The Chinese characters are those for “No Mind” but it is not a state of no mind, or blank mind. If is a state of no delusions, a mirror free of dust, the state where this brilliant light of wisdom pervades everything.
This No Mind can also be explained in terms of “non-producing, non-extinguishing.” Non-producing is the state without a trace of delusion, and non-extinguishing is the state of the great light of wisdom. Non-producing is the “tranquil” and non-extinguishing is the “light.”
In the Sutras, this state of Mind is referred to as correct, or proper wisdom. Correct, or proper refers to the state without delusion, and the wisdom refers to the great light. So Buddha is often described as maintaining wisdom at a fixed level. The achievement of the state is also called “seeing one’s true nature.” It is achieving both Buddhahood and nirvana at the same time.
Many people think of nirvana as a state which comes after death. But a state of nothingness after death is not nirvana. True nirvana is this state of completely delusionless tranquillity in a brilliance of universal magnitude. To think that the stillness that we are talking about exists without this brilliance is not Buddhism. And achievement of this state of tranquillity and brilliance is what we mean by deliverance or release from suffering and delusion. The Awakening of Faith sums this all up simply by saying that deliverance is release from all delusion and the reaching of this Great Light of Wisdom.
Based on what I have said, you now should be able to imagine what Buddhism is talking about when we use such terms as attaining Buddhahood, realizing Buddha nature, or achieving No Mind. Of course, to you this is still nothing but theory or speculation. But if you consider yourself a Buddhist, you have to try to experience this yourself. That is the very purpose of Buddhism. So you’re wondering if in fact you are capable of experiencing this.
Equality is basic to Buddhism, and we are all equal in that our basic nature is that of Buddha. So becoming a Buddha is not transformation out of the human state into another realm. Let’s go back to the analogy of the spotless mirror―it reflects everything in a bright light. This bright light is the still mind, it is the Tranquil Brilliance, it is maintaining wisdom at a fixed level, and it is non-producing and non-extinguishing.
Then why are we humans like a damaged mirror, incapable of reflecting this brilliance? If our basic nature is pure and clear and brilliant, then why are we in this human state of pain and suffering? Not because the mirror is damaged, but because our mind is covered with dust. If we wish to reflect this Great Light, this still Mind, there is no need to make ourselves into another mirror. All we have to do is to discover the mirror within us and wipe away the dust to find our true selves.
One of my favorite expressions is, “Take a good look at yourself.” And to wipe away the dust is to take a good look at who you really are, to see your mirror, to reflect the Great Light. When I say, “Open the Eye.” I am talking about this still. Mind, this No Mind. There are a thousand ways of expressing this, but they all mean the same thing.
What does this No Mind have to do with the mundane world? In the old days, some people used to think that there really was no difference between Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. To say such a thing, is however, practically a travesty. In both theory and practice, Confucianism and Taoism just add more delusion to people already filled with delusion; in theory and in practice, they just add more dust to the mirror.
The purpose of Buddhism, on the other hand, is to achieve this state of No Mind through the elimination of all delusion. How can you equate dust makers and dust removers? To say that Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism are the same is to say that you know nothing about Buddhism. Think of it: even a Bodhisattva who has achieved Universal Enlightenment is still struggling with dust, so you can imagine what Confucianism and Taoism are like.
The world has become smaller, and there are all kinds of religions and philosophies floating around in addition to Confucianism and Taoism. How does Buddhism compare to all of this? Let me be very frank with you. You may talk about the greatness of a certain philosopher, a certain religious leader, or a great scientist. But all of those people are talking out of delusion. None of them has ever said a single word about the level of the delusionless state of No Mind.
A while ago I said that Buddha is the very basis of Buddhism, and that Buddha was this No Mind. I said that sentient beings were creatures living in the world of delusions, and that Buddhahood was the state of ridding oneself of all delusions and attaining this state of No Mind. Not a single one of these other supposedly great philosophies or religions or sciences even mentions a concept similar to this attainment of NO Mind. And it is here, with this No Mind, that we find the greatness and the distinctiveness of Buddhism, a greatness and distinctiveness that no other religion or philosophy can come close to.
But you cannot clearly see truth when you are filled with delusions. To know the truth, you must be free from delusion. You cannot see truth and you cannot experience No Mind before you eliminate your delusions. Everything other than the level of Supreme Enlightenment, or Buddhahood, is false knowledge, false views. At the stage of Supreme Enlightenment, the mirror has been completely cleared of all dust, of all delusion; you reflect everything, you see everything, you understand everything. It is correct knowledge, it is correct perception, it is complete Truth. And from this position, all other philosophies and all other religions are based on delusion, on false knowledge and false views. They cannot be seen as correct knowledge or correct perception.
If you do not have correct knowledge and correct perception, you cannot behave correctly. Can a blind person walk straight by himself? Can a mirror covered with dust reflect light? Can Mind covered with delusion have correct knowledge and behave in a correct manner? Correct behavior cannot be achieved until one has experienced the state of No Mind, the Tranquil Brilliance.
So, what is a Buddha? A Buddha is someone who sits correctly, who sees correctly, who behave s correctly, who lives correctly. And I think everyone wants to understand correctly, to see correctly and to live correctly. How can we do this, however, when Wisdom’s Eye is closed?
Buddhism is an attempt to live correctly, but you cannot live correctly in a state of delusion. You have to experience No Mind to understand perfectly and then to be able to live correctly. Yet even a Bodhisattva who has achieved Universal Enlightenment is blind, and for such a Bodhisattva to teach people is a case of the blind leading the blind. If you’re going to lead others, you have to be able to see properly yourself, you have to understand correctly, and you have to behave correctly.
Let me briefly review what I’ve covered today with you. Creatures which live in the realm of delusion are called sentient beings. And to become free of all delusions is to be a Buddha. This state of non-delusion is what we mean by No Mind, but this No Mind is not a blank mind. It is like a state where the dust has been wiped from the mirror, where everything is reflected, where the clouds have rolled back and where the sun shines brilliantly. In this state there are no more delusions, and the Great Light of Wisdom is all-pervading. It is realizing the state of non-producing and non-extinguishing.
You cannot find this state of No Mind in any other religion or philosophy. There are innumerable religions throughout the world, and there may be certain discernments of ultimate truth in the teaching of their founders; but they have all failed to see anything but small fragments of Truth.
It is a fact that no other system opens its Eye wide enough to consider everything in the universe. Consequently, all Buddhists should have thorough confidence while striving to attain the state of No Mind. But to just talk about it is to just talk about food on an empty stomach―you must eat to be full.
This No Mind is not something we have made up. It is our fundamental nature, it is our original face, and it is the very basis of Buddhism. I am always saying that sentient beings are Buddha, but perhaps you don’t believe me because all you see is the sentient being and not the Buddha nature in you. But clear the dust from the mirror, wipe away all of your delusions, and you will see for yourself. If someone told you that there were a hidden gold mine around here, is there a single person who wouldn’t go digging?
You are originally, fundamentally Buddha. All you have to do is to recover this Buddha nature. You must have the confidence to recover it, and if you sincerely strive, you will see it very, very clearly. You will come to see who you really are, and there is nothing else after that.
Work diligently with your koan, and come to realize the magnificence of “No Mind.”

All ten directions are permeated with the One Vehicle Dharma. There are no Two Vehicle or Three Vehicle Dharmas―these are merely expedients used by the Buddha for teaching.1

The entire universe is the eternal Dharma realm, it is the all-pervading Dharma realm, it is the Dharma realm of the One Reality. In Buddhism this is also called the One Vehicle Dharma, or Law of the One Vehicle.

You must understand that this all-pervading, unobstructed world of the Dharma is not something that comes from Buddhism; rather, Buddhism comes from it. It was taught by the Buddha after this one true reality untolded before him during his Great Enlightenment. So everything in the universe and beyond is this one vehicle, and there is nothing else. It encompases everything that is, and everything that isn’t.

Yet we think the Buddha taught a great deal in addition to this Dharma. But everything else he taught was an expedient so that people could understand this one teaching more easily. And to understand the Buddha’s Teachings, you have to come to understand the One Vehicle Dharma.
After the Buddha was enlightened, he first delivered the entire Avatamsaka Sutra. But it was so difficult, so beyond the comprehension of the average person that he might as well have been talking to the deaf. And of what use would that have been, if, after the Great Enlightenment, he were the only one to be enlightened for ever and ever? Consequently, he decided that he would have to use expedients. He decided to talk in simplified terms understandable to people so that eventually they would come to know the truth of the One Vehicle. He reverted to the Three Vehicles as a means to make the One Vehicle more easily understandable.
The Buddha spoke to meet the needs of the occasion and to meet the needs of whoever he was addressing. He spoke like a child to children, like a student to students, to commoners like a commoner, to royalty like royalty so that whoever was listening would understand him.
If everyone had understood what he was saying when he delivered the Avatamsaka Sutra, there would have been no need to proceed this way. But he had to work his way gradually, by beginning with simple explanations. This eventually led to the other Sutras, and as people became more attuned to what he was saying, he delivered his final two Sutras, the Lotus Sutra and the Mahaparinirvana Sutra. He had begun with the One Vehicle in the Avatamsaka Sutra, and finally returned to the One Vehicle in the Lotus Sutra. His forty years of teaching in between were expedients in trying to get across the concept of this One Vehicle.
Consequently, we have the 84,000 Dharma Teachings to meet the needs of so many kinds of people. So these are not the real Truth, but expedients for coming to an understanding of the One Truth. In between the Avatamsaka and Lotus Sutras we have all kinds of Sutras, all of which contribute in one way or another to bring about an understanding of the One Vehicle. It was through these other Sutras that people gradually came to an understanding of the One Vehicle.
Well, what is this One Vehicle that we’re talking about, this one and only Truth? We regard the Avatamsaka and Lotus Sutras as the representative Sutras of this One Vehicle. But what is it that they contain that makes them so representative?
First to compile systematic doctrine based on the perfect Doctrine of the One Vehicle was the Chinese Master T’ien-t’ai Chih-i.2 Concerning the Lotus Sutra, Chih-i said that the perfect Doctrine came from The Middle Way, and that this is a parting from reality based on relative dualities. The world based on subject and object is one of dualities, but such a world of discrimination is not the real Dharma.
He also said that it was through strenuous endeavor that the mind would become bright and clear, and when it did that, one was beyond dualities; but at the same time, this would reflect what appeared to be another duality, that of the eternal truth and the false truth. At this point, however, one would syncretize these apparent dualities, as well, into one. Truth and non-truth are syncretized just as good and evil are.
So The Middle Way becomes one of syncretizing dualities in addition to transcending them, and this is the Perfect Doctrine of the One Vehicle. Chih-i concentrated on the Lotus Sutra from which we get the term Bhutatathata or ultimate reality. The Perfect Doctrine claims that to transcend dualities completely is to syncretize them completely, and this is The Middle Way, the One Vehicle.
What is the difference between transcending dualities and syncretizing dualities? Let me make an analogy for you. For our purposes, think of it this way, and think carefully. When it is cloudy, we cannot see the sun. But if the sky clears, then the sun comes out. To transcend the dualities of cloudy and sunny, we could say that the sky cleared.
But to syncretize the dualities, we would say that the sun came out. However, to say that the sun came out is the same as saying that the sky cleared, and to say that the sky cleared is to say that the sun came out. So transcending and syncretizing are not two different things. The dualities are both transcended and syncretized.
To transcend dualities is to syncretize them, and this is the Perfect Doctrine of the One Vehicle, and it is The Middle Way.
Consequently, the Dharma realm of the One Reality, the ultimate, the fundamental true reality, the absolute or whatever you want to call it―it is all equal, it is all real, it is all eternally Thus. Eyerything is freely syncretized into one, that which we call the all-pervading Dharma. There are no dualities; they are all transcended, they are syncretized, and everything is free-flowing, unobstructed. The Bhutathatha is the all-pervading, and the all-pervading is the Bhutathatha.
Let’s take a minute here to see what the Avatamsaka Sutra, the complete teaching of the One Vehicle, has to say on the matter. Chinese National master Ch`ing-liang3 in his Treatise on the Avatamsaka Sutra, grasped the meaning of the Sutra quite well:

While brightening, clearing,
while clearing, brightening;
together brightening and together clearing;
evenly, fully bright,
and the meanings have been syncretized.

What he is saying here is that to unite or syncretize is to transcend, and to transcend is to syncretize. The dualities are both transcended and syncretized at the same time; and the dualities transcend themselves and at the same time syncretize. This is the Perfect Doctrine―everything is comprehensive, everything is complete, everything is round and bright, and this is the meaning of the Avatamsaka Sutra. All apparent dualities are both transcended and syncretized as Ch’ing-liang has very aptly pointed out.
Chih-i said the same thing, but he was using the Lotus Sutra as the basis for interpretation. So if you can grasp the meaning of this “both transcend and syncretize,” then you have come to an understanding of the Avatamsaka Sutra.
Ch’ing-liang and Chih-i both reached this same conclusion, so one would assume that they would agree completely. However, the Avatamsaka sect regarded the Lotus Sutra as the last Sutra to be taught, and therefore not the original Perfect Doctrine. That is the only difference―the meanings of the Sutras are the same. So we consider both the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Lotus Sutra to be representative of the Perfect Doctrine of the One Vehicle.
The deeper you get into the logic of this thought system, the more complicated it becomes. And this leads us into the Four Dharma Realms of the Avatamsaka Sutra: l) the noumenal with unity, 2) the phenomenal with differentiation, 3) the noumenal and phenomenal are interdependent and unobstructed, and 4) all phenomena are interdependent and unobstracted. The duality of the noumenal and the phenomenal is transcended and syncretized, for the noumenal is found in the phenomenal and the phenomenal is found in the noumenal. So this applies to everything in the universe, and from that we conclude that everything is The Middle Way, and that everything conse-quently is absolute. This is the basic theory behind both the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Lotus Sutra.
Following this logic, then, is the fact that paradise or heaven cannot be a separate entity. If everything is unobstructed, free-flowing and The Middle Way, then wherever you are must necessarily be paradise.
So the main point of concern is whether we are aware of this absolute reality or not. If your Eye is closed, then everything is dark no matter how bright the sun may be. But whether you understand this or not does not in any way detract from the fact that the we are living in the world of the free-flowing Light. If you can’t see, or if you refuse to see, that’s that. But the fact still remains that we are living in this world of the all-pervading Dharma. So we must strive to become aware of this. We must strive to open the Eye.
This all-pervading Dharma realm is the One Truth, the One Vehicle. Of course we have all kinds of other terminology, all kinds of contradictions and all kinds of other logic and reasoning. But as I stated earlier, these are all falsities, these are all expedients in bringing about gradually increased understanding and eventual awareness of the all-pervading Dharma realm.
Once you have truly become aware of this, then you must abandon all the falsities and all the expedients. To do otherwise would be foolishness. But one who is unaware of this One Vehicle, this One Truth, must pace himself with these other expdients, and work towards a gradual understanding through them.
To summarize, the whole universe and beyond is the One Vehicle Dharma Realm, and there is nothing else. Everything is originally, fundamentally the all-pervading Dharma, the Absolute.
So is this the end to the argument? No. The One Vehicle is the reality, and the Three Vehicles are expedients. But the Three Vehicles themselves must necessarily also be The Middle Way, the One Vehicle. Why? Because we have syncretized the duality of One Vehicle and Three Vehicles.

Zen-Beyond the One Truth

And then we have the Zen School. No matter how much you may shout or talk about or expound upon this One Vehicle, it is exactly that―talk. It is doctrine, but not practice. You can talk about tood, but that does not fill your stomach. If you are hungry, then you must eat. You can take a cooking course for years, but of what good is it if you don’t put it to use for you? Doctrine is the Teachings of the Buddha, but Zen is the actual transmission of the Buddha-mind. So to Zen, even the Perfect Doctrine of the One Vehicle is false and it is merely an expedient. It is only through Zen that one can really come to know, that one can fill one’s stomach so to speak, through practice. Ch’an master Chin-jong4 said that self nature was inexhaustible, and that everything was “the one flavor” but that Zen had to go beyond even this “one flavor.” He was talking about the One True Dharma, the allpervading Dharma. But how can “the one flavor” be inexhaustible if everything in the universe is different? Only by syncretizing can we undetstand everything as being of “the one flavor.” Thus good and evil, form and formlessness, everything is syncretized into the same inexhaustible flavor.
You all know the saying, “Pointing at the moon but seeing only the finger.” One Vehicle Buddhism is saying, “This is reality, this is reality,” but it, too, is seeing only the finger. This is true also of the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Lotus Sutra, and the Perfect Doctrine of the One Vehicle. It is all talk, and the One Vehicle, too, becomes an expedient, a falsehood. You must understand this if you are to enter the path to become enlightened. To go around saying that the Perfect Doctrine of the One Vehicle is Buddhist Truth, to say that it is the ultimate, to say that it is the greatest is to be seeing only the finger, and you will never see the moon.
To come to know genuine Truth, rather than just knowing about it, we must rid ourselves of all expedients. We must toss away the One Vehicle and the Perfect Doctrine into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We have to look beyond the finger to see the moon.
There is an old saying that you have to regard the Buddha and all the Zen predecessors as enemies before you can begin to study. Right now you probably think that all the Zen classics and written records of the predecesso rs are true, and that the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Lotus Sutra are nothing but pure Truth. But if and when you become really enlightened, you will realize that all of these are nothing but thorns to the Eye. To become enlightened, and thus free-flowing, you must transcend the Buddha and you must transcend the records of the masters. If you feel that you have to listen to this person talk or that person talk, or if you get tied up in this expedient or that expedient, you will continue to do nothing but fail in your quest and you will not live eternally.

If you ask what Buddha is, Buddha is young Mr. Ma’s wife at the Stream of the Golden Sand.

This quotation is from a Dharma talk by Master Feng-hsueh1 of the Lin-chi school of Ch’an. Another monk had asked him what the Buddha was, and that was his reply. But you can only fully understand the true meaning of this koan through meditation, and you would really have to apply yourself to make such a breakthrough. But I would like to talk today about the background of this koan.
In what is now Shaanhsi-sheng in China, there is a famous river named Chin-sha T’an-t’ou, or “Stream of the Golden Sand.” During the reign of Chen-yuan in the Tang dynasty, there was a stunningly beautiful girl who lived by the river. Rich men, high government officials, men from all over the place came to propose to her. The girl had only one thing to say to all these imploring men:
“There are lots of men who propose to me, and I have only one life, so I will marry the man who meets my conditions. I will marry the man who memorizes “The supernatural powers of Avalokitesvara,2 from the Lotus Sutra.”
Overnight some twenty men memorized the section from the Lotus Sutra. So the girl said that she would have to make another qualification: she would marry the man who could memorize the Diamond Sutra. The next morning at dawn, some ten men showed up. She was then torced to make yet another qualification to reduce the competition. She said that she would marry the man who could memorize the entire Lotus Sutra. The Lotus Sutra was long, but many of the ten remained steadfast in their determination to win the ladys hand. Two days later, the young son of a certain Mr. Ma showed up and recited the entire Sutra for the girl. Greatly impressed, the girl said, “I could take anyone I wanted for a husband, but I have found you now, and have no regrets. I will marry you.”
On the day of the wedding they had a grand ceremony, and after the rites the girl returned to her room. But even before all the guests had left, cries of pain came streaming from her quarters. The bride rolled about in agony, and then died.
Young Mr. Ma was stunned. He had stayed up two nights memorizing the entire Lotus Sutra so that he could marry this girl, and she died on the day of the wedding!
Immediately after she died, the body began to rot and puss oozed out all over the room. How could this be? Just a short time ago she had been the most beautiful girl in the world. But every corpse must rot, whether it belongs to a king or a pauper. So the family hurriedly put this rotting corpse into a coffin and buried what was once the most beautiful girl in all of Tang.
The groom could not forget her though. He wondered about this terrible fate, and sat around sighing for days. Then one day a monk suddenly appeared looking for him. The monk wanted to know if this was the place where the bride had died, and if he could be taken to the grave.
When they got to the grave, the monk took his staff and struck it. The grave split open, and it was filled with bones made of gold. In only a matter of days, the joints had all become golden ringlets, so when they lifted the head, the entire body rose up. The monk asked the man if he understood what this meant, but the man had no idea.
“This woman was Avalokitesvara. The people in this area have such a lack of faith that she decided to appear here as a beautiful girl. Look at this gold!”
The man who had memorized the entire Lotus Sutra in just two days stood there gazing at the incredible sight. “Now I have really seen Avalokitesvara!” he exclaimed.
The monk went on: “She has taught you the Dharma in such a marvelous way. You should all now fervently believe in Buddhism.” And then the monk suddenly flew away high into the sky.
So this is the background story behind the koan which I mentioned. Those of you who know a bit about Buddhism should be able to understand the symbolism involved in the story. But your reaction probably is one of doubt, and you wonder if such a thing is possible, if Avalokitesvara could really appear in this world in such a way. But you should not reject this as a falsehood, a tale, a fantasy just because you can’t understand it fully.
Avalokitesvara appears to humans much more frequently than you would think, and one place where she has appeared frequently is the sacred island of Baoto, off the coast of Ningpo in China. The name is derived from the Indian word for “white flower.” The entire island is dedicated to Avalokitesvara, and it has long been the main Chinese center of worship to her.
Although I’ve never been there, I’ve seen pictures of Chaoyin-dong, or “Grotto of the Tidal Sound.” It is there that she has appeared most frequently to those who pray to her. There are many sacred spots dedicated to Avalokitesvara in China, but for centuries and centuries, millions and millions have made pilgrimages to this place. Avalokitesvara appeared frequently to the tens of thousands who gathered at one time to light incense and to pray. She has delivered Dharma talks, performed numerous miracles, and done many other things there. Convinced in faith by her appearance, pilgrims would leave huge offerings of money.
Up until the communization of China, more than 4,000 monks were living at one time in a monastery on the island. But a great problem arose. While most of the pilgrims, in thanks for having seen Avalokitesvara, would make monetary donations, some were so moved by the apparitions that they would offer themselves by diving off the cliff there in a personal sacrifice to Avalokitesvara. Consequently, the local authorities had to erect numerous barricades in dangerous areas to prevent people from doing this. But still, some people foundways of getting through the barricades to dive from the cliffs.
Avalokitesvara has appeared not only on Baoto Island. she also appeared at the stream of the Golden sand. And the story of young Mr. Ma’s wife is not just tolklore; it is from Feng-hsueh, third to receive transmission in the Lin-chi sect, the largest Ch’an sect at the time.
The phrase “Young Mr. Ma’s wife at the stream of the Golden sand” also has a much deeper meaning, one that most people don’t understand. It has been passed down through the Wen-yen Ch’an school since it was spoken by Feng-hsueh. As I said before, however, you cannot understand the true meaning of this until you make the great breakthrough. I just talked about the background to the sentence. Let me now tell you more about a deeper meaning.
In the Ch’an tradition, there is a much more famous and astounding phrase: “Three-by-three in the front, three-by-three in the back.” This phrase can be found in The Blue Cliff Records among the one hundred case studies of koans, and it is ascribed to the Bodhisattva Manjusri3 in a conversation with the master Wu-chuo Wen-hsi.4 Wu-chuo had gone to Mt. Wu-t’ai in hopes of seeing an apparition of Manjusri, and in front of the Diamond Cave he met an old man. He followed the old man to a very fine temple, sat down with the old man, and they chatted. The old man asked,
“How are the Teachings going in the south?”
The people of this corrupt age keep a precept or two and are pretending to be monks.”
“Well, how many people come to the temples?”
“Oh, sometimes three hundred, sometimes five hundred,” replied Wu-chuo. Wu-chuo also wanted to ask something.
“How are the Teachings going around here?”
“Criminals live with the saints, and the dragons and snakes all mix together,” said the man.
“Well then, how many followers are there?” asked Wu-chuo.
“Three-by-three in the front, three-by-three in the back,” replied the old man.
We would take something like the statements about the criminals and saints living together and the dragons and the snakes all mixing together for their obvious figurative meaning. But the real meaning of the “three-by-three” is much, much deeper. Wu-chuo did not catch the meaning at the time, and he departed. As he was leaving the area, he tumed around to take another look, but the temple was gone. Wuchuo then composed his own verse:

Everything was a beautiful temple. I saw and chatted with Manjusri, but at the time I didn’t understand him. Turning around again, I saw nothing but green mountains and cliffs. Sometime later, he again met manjusri and listened to his Dharma talk. This is quite well known in the Zen School:
Someone who sits quietly for a while is better off than someone who builds as many jeweled pagodas as there are grains of sand along a river. Sooner or later the pagodas will collapse; but a single though from a pure heart is Buddha.
Many people know this quote, but not many know where it came from. It was spoken by Manjusri to Wu-chuo at Mt. Wu-t’ai.
The forms of Avalokitesvara, Manjusri and the other Great Bodhisattvas are not, however, just limited to thirty-two forms. All of the Bodhisattvas can appear in 300 forms, in 3,000 forms, in limitlees forms. someone who reaches the stage of enlightenment can freely move about and take any form he desires, and he can appear anywhere.
According to records, there is a place at Mt. Wu-t’ai in China where Manjusri has appeared frequently. In order to teach Dharma in various ways, he has appeared riding a lion, as an old man, as an emperor, and in numerous other forms. So someone with great faith who goes to Mt. Wu-t’ai and prays fervently may meet Manjusri.
But we don’t have to go to Baoto Island to meet Avalokitesvara, and we don’t have to go to Mt. Wu-t’ai to meet Manjusri. The Buddha said over and over that he would enter nirvana as an expedient to guide sentient beings, and that he was not really dying-he would always be everywhere in the universe to teach the Dharma.
Where is Baoto Island? Your faith is Baoto Island. If your faith is strong, every place you go is Baoto Island. And you don’t have to go to Mt. Wu-t’ai to meet Manjusri. Mt. Wu-t’ai exists in the heart of those with faith. Faith! All you have to do is to meditate and to pray with this deep faith. Then you can see Avalokitesvara, you can meet Manjusri, and you can see Buddha.

For hundreds, even thousands of years, man has been debating the issue of the existence of a spirit. Yet the issue is still unresolved. Many scholars, philosophers and religious people have argued for the existence of a spirit while others have argued against it. And the arguing continues even to this day.
No matter where you look in Buddhist Sutras, whether Theravadin or Mahayanin, you will find the Buddha’s words on the continuing cycle of birth and death, reincarnation. According to this teaching, which is central to Buddhist thought, death as we know it is not the end. One is reborn again in another form according to ones karma.
The question is, how valid is this teaching? In the modern academic community, many are claiming that a spirit which experiences this cycle of birth and rebirth cannot be explained. And even if a spirit could be explained, how could there be such a thing as reincarnation? Additionally, some people argue that the Buddha used this concept of reincarnation as an expedient even though there is no such thing. They consider reincarnation as an educational means to get people to modify their behavior.
On the other hand, science is becoming increasingly interested in the non-material, the world of the psyche. And with developments in this area, more scholars are beginning to believe that there is a spirit, that there is reincarnation, and that the principle of cause-and-effect works on the psychological or spiritual level.
So if there is this cycle of reincarnation, of endless cause-and-effect, how are we supposed to behave in order to be released from the cycle? I’d like to talk about this subject today. Understanding reincarnation is essential to your understanding of Buddhism, and when you come to understand this thoroughly as a follower of the Buddha, you will have the proper attitude in your own personal life, in teaching Buddhism, and in attaining your own enlightenment. Many scholars, scientists and researchers throughout the world today are trying to uncover the mysteries which surround this concept of, or belief in, reincarnation. And they are finding increasing evidence to support this. The method that is gaining the most credence through impartial observation is that of previous life recollection. One of the most interesting discoveries is that of two- or three-year-olds who volunteer information about their former lives. And research into the information given proves them right. Let me give you an example.
About 25 years ago in southern Turkey, there was a child named Ismail. His family ran a butcher shop. One evening, at the age of about a year-and-a-half, Ismail was lying down with his father when he suddenly told his father that he was going to run away. He claimed that his real home was in a neighboring village and that his name was not Ismail.
The child then told his father that he had been the owner of the orchard in that village, but that he had died at the age of 50. His wife couldn’t bear children, so he had remarried, fathered four children, and lived quite well. But one day he had had an argument with a worker in the orchard, and the worker had hit him on the head, killing him. The child said that it happened in the stable, and that when he had screamed, his wife and two of the children came running and the worker killed them, too. The child then said that he had come back to be born in that particular house so that he could go and see the other two remaining children that he missed so much.
The child continued to insist on going to the house with the orchard, but everyone just laughed. And whenever they laughed, he would talk more about his former life. Once his father brought home a watermelon for the family, and he gave the child a big slice, but the child wouldn’t eat it. He said that he wanted to take it to his daughter who used to love watermelon.
Since the village with the orchard was not far away, people from there occasionally came to Ismail’s village. One day the child spotted a man who had come from the village with the orchard and who was seiling ice cream. The child approached the man and identified himself, but the man was at a loss. The child then identified himself further, and said that the man used to sell fruit and vegetables from the orchard. He also said that he had circumcised the man when the man was a child.
Upon investigation, all the facts were proved correct, and rumors began to spread. But Turkey is an Islamic nation, and the idea of reincarnation is rejected. If someone made claims to it, he could be ostracized from the village. So as rumors spread, everyone tried to keep the child quiet. The more they did this, however, the more the child made a fuss.
Finally, when the child was three, they took him to the house with the orchard in the other village. On the way, the child who had never been to the village kept pointing the way and led everyone right up to the orchard. When they got there, the first wife of the deceased was sitting there, astounded at the sight of a child leeding a large group of people to her. The child called her by name, ran up to her and held on to her. He consoled her about having such a hard life, which baffled her even more. Then the child went on to explain that he had been her former husband, that he had been born again in the other village, and that he had come to see her.
Then the child saw the deceased man’s children, and calling them by name, ran to them and hugged them as a parent would. The people then took the child to the stable, and he asked about his favorite horse, a brown one, which was nowhere to be seen. He then inquired about the former workers, one by one and by name, and he described them exactly in terms of age, where they came from, and so forth. Everyone was astonished.
This soon became an international event of sorts, and when the child was six, in the year 1962, a team of scholars, scientists and other experts was formed for an investigation. There were so me Japanese scholars on this team, and there was something which convinced them thoroughly of the validity of the claims. Evidently before the man was killed, he had loaned some money but the borrower had never paid it back. The borrower was called in for an interview.
Upon seeing the man, the child said that on such-and-such a date he had loaned the man a certain amount of money. He wanted to know why the man hadn’t paid it back to his remaining family. Upon investigation, the date of the loan and the amount of money were both exact, and the somewhat embarrassed man paid it back on the spot. No one had known about the loan at the time except the two men involved, so there was no way that this child could have known about the loan, the date or the amount. The investigators were convinced of the validity of the case, and the final report confirmed all findings.
There are innumerable documented cases throughout the world, cases such as this story of Ismail. Let me tell you about a couple of others.
Just a few years ago in Sri Lanka, there was a set of twins aged three years and seven months, twins who kept talking about their former lives. An investigative team took the twins to the village where they claimed to have lived. A crowd of several hundred had gathered there, and the investigators had intentionally included the people who the children had claimed had been their family in a previous life. They then told the children to pick their family members out of this crowd of hundreds. And the children proceeded to pick out each family member.
There was another case where a three-year-old kept talking about having been a member of a diving team in his former life. When he was asked if he could still dive, he replied that he could, so they took him to a swimming pool where he performed like a professional diver.
There are lots of children nowadays who are geniuses, prodigies, children who are born with an immense amount of conscious knowledge. For example, there are some children who have never been taught to read but who can read just about anything. But no one has and explanation for this phenomenon. In Buddhism, however, we perceive this ability to read something as being left undisturbed from a previous life. You’ve probably had your own flashes of this type of thing―complete familiarity with a place you have never been before, instant attraction or familiarity with someone you’ve met for the first time, or even a special, unexplainable knack for doing something.
But how many people have this capability of former life recall? While most people don’t have any recollections of past lives, some people have very vague recollections and some have very clear recollections. And in recent decades a number of scholars, specialists, researchers and research organizations have been established to investigate the subject. One of the most famous of these researchers was Professor Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia’s Medical College.
Professor Stevenson established a worldwide network so that people everywhere who claimed to have this recollection ability could be investigated and have their claims either confirmed or refuted. Having investigated over 600 people, Stevenson selected twenty representative cases, and published these in a book called Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. This book presented conclusive evidence of the validity of claims made, validity which cannot be refuted, and the book was translated into numerous foreign languages, becoming a major topic of discussion around the world.
In addition to recollection of past lives, there is a phenomenon called transmigration. One of the best known cases took place in China in 1916, with a report appearing in the Shenchon Jihpao Daily on February 2 th of that year.
According to this report, a certain Ts’ui T’ien-hsuan of Shantong-sheng died at the age 32 from an incurable disease. He was uneducated and had worked as a stone mason. On the day of the funeral, noises started coming from inside the coffin. When the family opened up the coffin, the person was alive. The family was both over-joyed and stunned at the same time. The person who came out of the coffin, however, did not recognize any of the family members, and people could not understand the language he spoke. Everyone thought he must be delirious from the tim he had spent in the coffin.
After a few days, the man had recovered considerably but he sitll did not recognize anyone, and people could not communicate with him. Completely frustrated, the man took an inkstone, ink and a brush, and began writing in beautiful Chinese caligraphy. This was man who was illiterate efore he supposedly died.
He wrote, in perfect calligraphy, that he was from Indochina. He had been ill and his mother had covered him with a heavy blanket to make him sweat. The last thing he remembered was going to sleep. And now he was there in quite unfamiliar surroundings.
The mason had in fact died, but the spirit of a man from Indochina had taken over his body. So we can see from this and other examples that forms of reincarnation are many, and they are not restricted to just rebirth from a female womb. This method of moving from one body to another is what we mean by transmigration.
After the man recovered fully, the family began to teach him spoken Chinese. The man, however, kept on insisting on returning to his home in Indochina. The family finally took the man o Beijing University where he underwent psychological examination and received some form of minor treatment, but he was judged normal. The university sent someone to Indochina to investigate the case and to confirm the existence of this man as well as other details concerning his life and death. Everything that the man had claimed was confirmed. It was concluded that in fact he had been reborn in the body of the mason, Mr. Ts’ui. And the story had a happy ending-the man was given a yearly pension from the government!
In psychotherapy, there is also a method for investigating recollections of previous incarnations. Hypnosis has proved very effective in securing informaion on previous lives. This method is called hypnotic regression, a method in which a person is gradually taken backwards in his life under hypnosis. For example, if a person is brought back to the age of ten, he will describe his activities at that time. People will sing songs from early childhood which they have no conscious recollection of, and if brought back to infancy they usually cry a lot. This hypnotic regression has received increasing recognition as a method of unveiling former lives.
In medicine, increasing support is being given to hypnosis as a form of diagnosis. Sometimes people develop diseases or afflictions for which there is no obvious cause; but under hypnotic regression, the cause can often be uncovered. This regression method has also been used in securing information from spies who refuse to give information.
How does this apply to reincarnation? A person is brought back to the age of one through the hypnotic regression method, and the person often cries and kicks a lot as a one-year-old would. The person is then asked under continued hypnosis where he was a year before he was born, and the person begins to tell an entirely different story. He takes on a different time, place, name, address, and sometimes even gender. In psychotherapy, this methodology is referred to as a return to previous existence. And often not to just one previous existence―often to two, three or more previous existences.
Western psychology, on the basis of Freud’s work, divides the human mind into three levels: the conscious, the latent or pre-conscious, and the sub- or unconscious. Freud of course pioneered theories on the unconscious, but it was Sir Alexander Cannon who really did extensive work on the subject. He was knighted in England and he was an outstanding lecturer at institutes in five European nations. Perhaps his greatest contributions were in the investigation of former lives.
Initially, as a scientist, he had denied the validity of both the spirit and reincarnation but using hypnosis as an investigative method, he consistently came across accounts of previous lives through this hypnotic regression process. He brought some people even as far back as the Roman Empire, and much of what he recorded was proved through historical evidence. On the basis of what he collected from a total of 1,382 patients, he published a book, The Power Within, in 1952.
His many findings included cases where the cause of an affliction was uncertain and where the affliction did not respond to treatment. Through hypnotic regression, he could discover the cause and consequently provide a cure. It was obvious to him that the affliction had carried over from former lives.
One interesting example was that of a man who was absolutely terrified of water. He refused to go near the ocean and he would not live near a river. Under hypnosis, the man was taken back to former lives and it was discovered that in one former life he had been an oarsman on a merchant vessel in the Mediterranean Sea. Having committed a crime against one of his mates, he was shackled and tossed into the ocean as punishment. The terror of that event cartied over even into his present life. Based on this information provided through regression, the man was cured of his phobia.
There was another case, that of acrophobia. The man was terrified of going up a high flight of stairs. Under hypnosis it was discovered that he had been a Chinese general in a former life and had fallen from a cliff to his death. So with growing evidence for the theory of reincarnation, greatly aided by the work of Sir Alexander Cannon, former-life therapy has become increasingly widespread internationally. In the October 3, 1977 issue of TlME magazine, there was an extensive article on the subject, and TlME is hardly a magazine to devote space to nonsense. So there is greatly increasing international recognition and acceptance of both reincarnation and former-life therapy.
If there is reincarnation, then, what are its principles? Can you reappear as anybody you want to reappear as? In Buddhism, the basic premise is that good actions reap good effects, and misdoings breed suffering. This law of nature is a universal law and it is a Buddhist law. Based on this law, all you have to do is to look around you: those who planted seeds of retribution in former lives are unhappy or unfortunate one way or another in this life, and those who planted seeds of good are comparatively happy in this life.
In the Lotus Sutra, we find that the Buddha said that if you want to know about your past lives, just look at your present. You are the culmination of everything you have ever been and done. And if you want to look into the future, look at your present―what you are doing now determines your future. In other words, you can tell by the situation in your present life what your past was like, and what you plant today you will reap tomorrow. This law of cause-and-effect is called karma, and the use of this word has proliferated around the world, and increasingly into academic circles.
There is another man who did a great deal in explaining and illustrating this law of cause-and-effect, an American named Edgar Cayce. Cayce did tremendous work with telepathic diagnosis. People from quite far away would send their names and addresses, and based on this information alone, Cayce could diagnose diseases. He also had tremendous healing powers, and treated over 30,000 people. He was able to diagnose people as far away as Europe. He also had such psychic power that he could tell, given a name, what a person in Europe was doing and where he was at that very moment. A simple phone call would confirm his telepathic accuracy.
Cayce knew that a great deal of disease had origins in previous forms of existence. But he was a Christian, and Christianity has refuted reincarnation since it was struck from its dogma at the council of constantinople in 553. This religious conflict was too great for Cayce, and due to his religious beliefs he ceased his work. But the people around him urged him to continue and helped him to reconcile his spiritual/religious convictions with his psycho-academic pursuits.
He finally dispensed with healing and poured himself into investigating former lives. His records cover more than 2,500 cases of former life investigation, and academicians and psychics have been studying these records ever since. Several of Cayce’s publications have been translated into most major languages.
Cayce had a lot to say about cause-and-effect in relation to former lives. One case study was about a couple who had a very unhappy marriage, and upon hypnotic regression, Cayce discovered that in a former life they had been enemies. In some instances, happily married couples were revealed to have had parent-child relationships in former lives. We find this hard to believe, but this is how cause-and-effect can work.
There would be no problem if we could just recall former lives, but the average person can’t. However, I think that as more and more scientists become involved in this field of investigation, the more likely they are to agree with the Buddha’s Teachings on cause-and-effect and reincarnation. According to the Teachings, an overly greedy person who ridicules and looks down upon others will return as an exceedingly short person. And one former life investigation confirmed this. So we have another reason to respect and to look up to other people no matter who they may be.
I think there is already sufficient evidence today to support the Buddha’s Teachings of cause-and-effect in terms of reincarnation, but we can expect the volume of material on these subjects to grow rapidly in the future. As Buddhists, however, we do not have to rely on contemporary scientific evidence for our convictions. As Buddhists, we accept the Teachings of the Buddha.
It is important for Buddhists to realize that they should not reject this or that Teaching just because they don’t quite understand it. The fact that you don’t understand it is your shortcoming, not the Buddhas. So through your own experience you should try to come to understand the meanings of the Teachings fully.

A major basis of Buddhism is found in the saying that “Everything comes from mind.” This means that everything that you experience is a reflection of mind and that there is nothing that is not a reflection of this mind. We also have another important saying― “Mind is Buddha.” That is to say, everything that comes from mind is Buddha.
All of the Buddha’s teachings are recorded in the Tri-pitaka of over 80,000 Sutras. But when would you ever get around to reading them all? Maybe you think it’s easier just to forget about Buddhism. But all the tens of thousands of Sutras can be summed up in just one simple Chinese character, the One for Mind. All Sutras bound up as one would spell out this “Mind,” and if you come to resolve this issue of Mind, you will understand all that there is to understand. Then all the Buddhas of the three periods1) will appear before you.
We also say that everything begins with mind and ends with mind. So in Buddhism the objective is to open Wisdom’s Eyes so that we may see our real nature, our true selves. And this is realizing the Buddha nature within ourselves.
I really don’t understand what’s going on nowadays, but people start Zen meditation, and after only three or four days they claim that they have made the breakthrough to this realization of their own Buddha nature. Perhaps there are many of you here today who feel the same way. But it seems to me that you can say that only because you don’t really know what your real Buddha nature is.
From Asvaghosha’s The Awakening of Faith we have this:

After you complete all stages of Bodhisattvahood, and even tiny delusions are gone, you’ll be able to see your real nature, and this is called supreme Enlightenment.2)

So even after completing the ten levels of sainthood and attaining Universal Enlightenment, the Bodhisattva must go beyond until the last, tiny delusions of basic ignorance found in the Alaya-vijnana3) have been removed. And it is here that one finds the Bhutatathata, the unchanging reality. This 52nd and final level is the discovery of the Buddha nature within oneself, the Supreme Enlightenment. It is also referred to as the “mystical enlightenment” and the “wonderful enlightenment of Mahayana.”
From the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, we have:

When you reach the incomparable, Supreme Enlightenment, you will see the nature of Buddha; and when you see the nature of Buddha, you have reached the incomparable, Supreme Enlightenment.

This incomparable awakening, the attainment of Buddhahood, is seeing the nature of Buddha and seeing one’s own Buddha nature. It is the same attainment of Buddhahood, the same level of supreme Enlightenment that we found in The Awakening of Faith.
And the Buddha spoke more about this in the Mahaparinirvana Sutra:

Even if one completes the ten levels of sainthood, he still has not yet found his real Buddha nature.

So even a Bodhisattva who has completed the levels of sainthood must attain Supreme Enlightenment in order to see his Buddha nature, the Essence of Mind. Supreme Enlightenment and seeing ones Buddha nature are one and the same.
In the Yogacaryabhumi Discourse, there is another highly relevant statement:

A Bodhisattva before the level of Supreme Enlightenment is like someone looking at something in the dark.

That is to say, just as you can’t discern something clearly in the dark, a Bodhisattva who has reached the level of universal Enlightenment still has a long way to go to attain Supreme Enlightenment.
Consequently, if one is to realize one’s true nature, which in itself is eternal universal law, the Bodhisattva has to go beyond the darkness following both the ten levels of sainthood and the 51st level of Universal Enlightenment, and then into the Great Light.
What did the Ch’an School of China have to say about all of this? Master Yun-men Wen-yen, founder of the Yun-men school of Ch’an in the early 10th century in China, had a favorite saying:

A Bodhisattva af the tenth level of sainthood, the Dharma Cloud stage, may deliver a lecture just as perfectly as a sky full of clouds delivers rain. As far as seeing his Buddha nature, however, his eyes are covered with silk.

No matter how fine silk may be, one cannot see anything perfectly through it.
So from all of these important scriptures we can see that in both the Doctrinal and Ch’an schools, to see one’s own Buddha nature was to attain Buddhahood; and in doing so one has to go beyond both the ten levels of sainthood and the level of Universal Enlightenment to reach the Supreme Enlightenment.
Think of the levels of sainthood and Universal Enlightenment as a stairway one has to go up and over the stairway to reach Supreme Enlightenment. Yet we have people today who have not even gone up the first step who claim to have reached the Supreme Enlightenment. They claim to have seen their own Buddha nature and to have attained Buddhahood. But I wonder what they mean by seeing their own Buddha nature. These claims seem to be an illness in today’s Buddhism. And the problem is, where did this disease come from?
The problem seems to have begun with the Korean National Master Po-jo.5) According to his Secrets on Cultivating the Mind, in dealing with the question of sudden and gradual enlightenment, he said that realizing one’s true nature was a sudden, instant process, and after this one had to continually train oneself to remove deeply ingrained habits. He claimed that this instant process of enlightenment occurred during the first ten levels of Bodhisattva development, or the first stage, that of faith.
Master Po-jo had been influenced by the works of master Gui-feng Tsung-mi6) of China, and Master Po-jo’s arguments included sudden and gradual enlightenment. but Gui-feng never stated that sudden enlightenment occurred during this Bodhisattva stage of faith. The enlightenment that Gui-feng talked about was made possible by coming to understand the theories of the Doctrinal School. But Po-jo went a step further, calling sudden enlightenment the finding of one’s own Buddha nature, or the equivalent of Supreme Enlightenment, and he said that it occurred during the first stage, that of faith.
So, many people are wondering how this National Master of the Koryo dynasty could have been wrong. But all the Sutras and Discourses as well as the teachings of the patriarchs of Ch’an are explicit on this point: finding one’s own Buddha nature comes after all the stages and levels of Bodhisattva development. So dare we say that master Po-jo’s Secrets on Cultivating the Mind is more accurate than all of these other sources I have quoted, sources which are the very foundations of Buddhism and Ch’an? It seems to me that Master Po-jo’s work needs some basic correction.
We’re talking now about Bodhisattva development, Supreme Enlightenment, the Great Awakening. But how do we know what it is? What are our standards for determining this state? Buddhism has very clear standards concerning this.

Clarifying The Stages

In the “Ten stages Discourse” of the Avatamsaka Sutra we find:

At the seventh level of sainthood, one has no obstructions in dreams, and can study at one’s will.

This is referring to meditation. If one falls asleep during meditation and can still concentratedly study in one’s dream, then one has reached the seventh level of sainthood. A Bodhisattva who has reached this level can continue to meditate in dreams, although this may not be possible if he falls into a deep sleep. But there is a level where this is possible even in a very deep sleep. We also find from “Ten Stages Discourse”:

It may look like the Bodhisattva is sleeping, but really he is not.

No matter how deep his sleep, his mind is still as clear as if he were wide awake. If one can keep this mental state of clarity all the time, through waking and sleeping, then one has reached the level of complete freedom which is beyond the eighth level of sainthood. This level of complete freedom, however, may take either of two forms.
In the first form, if one retains complete clarity even in dreams, yet still has remains of the tiny, troublesome delusions from the Alaya-vijnana, then one is called a freely-moving Bodhisattva above the eighth level of sainthood. In the second form, however, if one has eliminated these tiny delusions completely, one will find ultimate reality, and then one is said to be at the level of Tathagata.
If we look at the stages of meditation in Buddhism, the first is called “maintaining clear movement”; that is to say, no matter what you’re doing in daily life, you should be maintaining an even meditation. You have to maintain constantly and evenly without disruption. At this stage, one cannot continue to meditate while sleeping, however, and does something else, like dream.
Being able to continue to meditate in dreams is called “maintaining in the middle of dreams.” But maintaining in the middle of dreams is not possible in a deep sleep at this level. Being able to maintain in a deep sleep is referred to as “maintaining fever eye.” Just maintaining in a deep sleep is not enough, however; one must go a step further in order to make the breakthrough to realizing one’s Buddha nature.
Yet hundreds of people have come to me, people who lose their meditation while sleeping, who lose it during dreams, and even worse, who lose it in their daily activities; and they claim to have seen their true Buddha nature. They claim to have been enlightened, and they ask for my recognition. This is the current disease. People start to meditate in earnest, but a certain something overcomes them completely. All of a sudden they think at this point that they are completely enlightened, and that they are greater than the Buddha and all of our Ch’an predecessors. And once they have this affliction, many of them usually won’t listen to anybody. Fortunately, after considerable persuasion, some people will get a hold of themselves and start to meditate again; but many just continue on with this disease.
Once a young monk was taken to a gathering of about 100 male Buddhists. And out of the 100, 90 claimed to have realized their Buddha nature. The monk said, “Well, why don’t you go see the Great Monk at Haein-sa just to be sure?”
“What is there to ask anyone, great monk or not?” was the response. Well, if there is no need for great monks or any monks, then you have no need for Buddha, either. We must be careful of this type of thinking.
Quite some time ago, a gentleman of about 70 came to see me. He performed 3,000 prostrations, and then came to my room. I asked him why he came, and he said that he had no intentions of his own to come, but those around him had urged him to do so.
I responded with, “You’re 70 years old, and you came to see me only because others insisted you should? You old goat! If you didn’t want to come on your own, that’s the end of it. What? Because others kept telling you to come?”
“I have meditated for some 40 years, and about 20 years ago I became enlightened. After that I went around visiting various monks, and that was rather useless, so I stopped. But people kept telling me to come and see you, so here I am.”
“Well, anyway, I’m glad you came. Having listened to you speak, I can tell that you carry a gem. After all, you meditated for such a short time and all your delusions disappeared, and after just a couple of more hours of meditation this great gem appeared. But let me ask you one thing, and please be honest. If you lie, you’ve had it. Does that gem appear in your dreams as well?”
As his eyes got bigger, he replied, “No.”
“What? Not in your dreams? You have a gem that doesn’t even appear in your dreams and you dare to claim that you’ve meditated?
And then you march around looking for other enlightened ones? Someone like you ought to drop dead. If in a single day ten thousand people came around and beat you to death, they’d never have to pay for it!”
I then hit him with a tea kettle, but he just sat there and took the blows. Then I asked him what he was going to do, and he said that he realized how wrong he had been and that he was going to start all over again. He’s still alive, now over 80, and still meditating.
This is the type of disease which is so prevalent: people claim to have a gem but it doesn’t even appear in their dreams, and they go around thinking that they’re the greatest thing in the world. There are people who can’t rid themselves of this, people who think that they’re some kind of a walking, talking gem field or diamond mine.
Maybe now you have some idea of what I am talking about when we use the term “realizing Buddha nature.” Now the question is, how do we go about making this breakthrough, this awakening?

Buddhist Methodology

In Buddhism, there are various methodologies for making the breakthrough including types of contemplation, use of mantras, Sutra study, chanting Dharani and so on. But the surest and the fastest way is meditation, and it is the best way.
Since meditation is a way to discover Mind, it is not limited to Buddhists and monks. Even Catholic priests and nuns come to Paengnyon-am, do 3,000 prostrations and receive a koan. but I don’t just give a koan to anyone who comes up here-everyone must perform 3,000 prostrations first.
Just a few days ago, three Christians came and did their 3,000 prostrations. I always tell Christians that there is one condition that they must agree to concerning their prostrations. The condition is that when they prostrate, they must make a wish that all those who refute their God and who curse Jesus are the first to go to their heaven. And they think that is really nice. After all, isn’t such an attitude a truly religious one? The one thing I can’t fathom is how people who claim to be truly religious can go around saying that only followers of their religion will go to a wonderful place after death, and everyone else will go to some place terrible.
The Buddha always said that the greater a person curses and hurts you, the greater you should respect, help and serve that person.
Christians and other non-Buddhists have a great interest in the Buddhist way of cleansing, or training the mind. The largest Catholic convent in Korea is in Waegwan outside of Taegu, and it’s run by a German nun. She’s been meditating on her koan for more than ten years now, and she comes by every now and then. She says that the more she meditates, the greater the experience becomes.
When she first came to see me, I asked her what Catholics used for basic doctrine in addition to the Bible, and she replied that they studied Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.
I told her that I understood that Aquinas, after all those years of work on the book, gave up on it when it was nearing completion. At first he thought that he had found gold deep in his heart, but when nearing completion he found that instead of gold it was rotting hay. So I told her that rather than relying on Aquinas’ work, she should look for what could cause such a change of heart. I told her that meditation on her koan would be a good way to do that.
There are lots of non-Buddhists who receive a koan and meditate. But for us Buddhists, meditation is the essential means of cleansing the mind before really practicing Buddhism.
There is a problem with koans, however. Some people don’t know a thing about a koan and yet will go ahead with it in meditation. For these people, actually, there really is no big problem. But some people think they understand a koan immediately. They think that its something anyone can understand easily, and they talk like experts on the subject. These people are the problem.
You never really know what a koan means until the Eye of Wisdom, or Mind’s Eye, is opened; that is to say, until you actually become enlightened. People who can’t maintain during dreams, who can’t maintain during sleep, who really don’t know what they’re talking about these people walk around talking as if they know it all. As I mentioned, this is a contemporary disease in Buddhism.
It’s like looking at the skin and assuming that you know everything about whats under it. But meaning is not to be found in words. Our Ch’an predecessors always referred to this as “dark-call-secret-command.” But this “dark call” or code means something quite different from talking. To read the Chinese character for “sky” and to think only of the blue expanse above you would be a complete misunderstanding of the character.
So you must think of all koans as “dark-call-secret-commands.” This phrase seems to imply talking, but it has nothing to do with talking at all. The deeper meaning is quite different from “dark call” and you can only know this meaning when you awaken to the stage of maintaining in sleep. There is no way of communicating to you what it means before then. So people talking as though they know everything, as if they were enlightened, is the current disease among meditators.
At Komazawa Soto University in Japan, they took 30 years to complete the Encyclopedia of Zen. In reading the book, I discovered that they have all koans listed and an explanation for each. So if you read the book, you would not have any need to meditate. I have only one thing to say about this, and I say it again and again: this encyclopedia is the worst book ever to come out of Japan. How could anyone ever explain a koan?
This university is run by the Soto Sect, and Tung-shan Liang-chieh,7) founder of the Ts’ao-tung school of Ch’an in China, always said that his teacher never took the Dharma or ethics seriously, and considered it most important not to bias students in any way.
You simply cannot explain a koan. If someone does, both he and the listener wind up at a loss. It’s like trying to explain colors to a blind man. He has to be able to see to really understand what you’re talking about.
Liang-chieh insisted throughout his life that koans were unexplainable. Yet his descendants in Japan did years of research, compiled a book, and claim they have solved all koans. What they are doing, of course, is committing a form of treason against their founder. So perhaps they should change the name of the sect to “Treason” Sect.
There is also a leading international Buddhist scholar in Japan, Professor Nakamura Hajime. His most famous work is Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples. In this book he explains the koan, “Three pounds of hemp” as an answer to “What is Buddha?”
Professor Nakamura claim is that the answer is supposed to imply that everything in nature is absolute―Buddha is absolute, and three pounds of hemp are absolute. He argues that “three pounds of hemp” is an appropriate response to this question. That’s fine for him if he wants to live in his own illusions; but I can’t understand why hes trying to ruin the Buddhist tradition through such foolishness.
His master, Yu-ching Po-shou, however, was not that way at all. He readily admitted that he was an outsider as far as Zen was concerned. And that demonstrates the conscience of a true scholar. He claimed not to have been enlightened, and since he was a Doctrinal scholar, he wrote only about the history of Zen. He never spoke about Zen nor did he ever try to evaluate Zen logic. But what are we supposed to do about someone like professor Nakamura who makes all these conclusions about koans? It seems to me that such efforts can only bring about the ruination of Buddhisrn.
Hsueh-tou8 of the Wen-yen school of Ch’an was working on a koan from The Blue Cliff Records and talking with a fellow monk about the koan, “The cypress tree in front of the courtyard.” In the middle of a rather heavy conversation, they noticed that a novice who had done an errand for them was standing there laughing. After the other monk had left, Hsueh-tou called the novice over.
“What were you laughing about while we were discussing the koan?” he asked.
“You’re still rather blind,” said the novice. “You were talking about ‘The cypress tree in front of the courtyard,’ but you were way off. Please listen to me for a minute….. the white rabbit turned off onto the old road, and a blue-eyed hawk saw this and went after him; but the hunting dog did not know this, and kept running around the tree.”
Think of it this way. The cypress tree is the rabbit, and the wise hawk goes after it. The dumb dog, however, keeps running around the tree. He could run around the tree forever, but he would never catch the rabbit. In other words, if you keep focusing on the cypress tree, you’ll never catch the meaning of the koan. Perhaps this makes clearer what I said earlier about “dark call” or underlying meaning. So now you should understand why one should not go about making literal interpretations of any koan.
Master Fo-chien Hui-ch’in9 once gave a talk about a koan, a very good one:

A Taoist god appeared above a colorful silk cloud, hiding his face with a red fan. Everyone should try to see his face, and not be bothered with the fan in his hand.

The message is clear, I think. If a god appeared before you, you’d want to see his face, wouldn’t you? Would you spend your time doting on the fan? That’s how it is with koans. “The cypress tree in front of the courtyard.” “Three pounds of hemp,” “Does a dog have Buddha nature?―all of these are like the fan in front of the god. And if you keep staring at the fan, you’ll never get to see the god. How can you believe someone who stares only at the fan, but claims to have seen the god?
All koans are such “dark calls” or codes for a much greater meaning, a meaning which can never be understood or transmitted through words. Only by maintaining meditation even in deep sleep will you come to understand a koan, and not before. And when the Eye opens, you will see your true Buddha nature, and not before. And then you will understand “The cypress tree in front of the courtyard.”

Traditional Meditation

Three great Ch’an masters were responsible for the growth and proliferation of the Lin-chi school of Ch’an: the 5th Patriarch Fa-yen Wen-yi,10 Yuan-wu K’e-ch’in,ll and Ta-hui Tsung-kao.12
Ta-hui began meditating early and became enlightened at the age of twenty. He quite mistakenly thought he was the greatest thing on earth― greater than the Buddha, greater than Bodhi-dharma. And he set out to prove it. He went to see the great masters, but as far as he was concerned, they weren’t anything special. So he played his role quite well, and began developing a following. At the time, Master Wen-chun13 was head of the Huang-lung branch of Lin-chi, and Ta-hui went to visit him.
Ta-hui began spouting forth like water from a bottle, like water from a waterfall. Wen-chun said to him, “You’ve really found something great. But is that same gem with you in your sleep?”
“Master, I have complete confidence in everything else. But when I go to sleep, there’s nothing there. I don’t know why.”
“There’s nothing there when you sleep, but you go around feeling greater than the Buddha, greater than Bodhi-dharma? That is a disease, and you have to cure it,” said Wen-chun.
Filled with this disease, Ta-hui had no choice but to start over again. Following the last words of Wen-chun, he went to see Master Yuan-wu. When he got there he found himself searching for words, and got the feeling that all of his efforts amounted to less than a single strand of a spider web. He had come with his mind made up to bury the master with his wisdom, but now didn’t know what to do. “I hadn’t realized how huge the universe was and what really great people there were,” he thought to himself. He repented for his foolishness and arrogance.
“Master, I didn’t know that I had been studying with a disease. Then I listened to what master Wen-chun had to say and continued to study, but to no avail. No matter how hard I tried, I could not keep up my study while sleeping. What should I do?”
“Forget all of your delusions, and just study as hard as you can. After all of the delusions have faded, you’ll probably come, for the very first time, close to really studying.”
So Ta-hui once again immersed himself in study. And then in the middle of a discourse by Master Yuan-wu, he suddenly became enlightened. According to the records, it was called “Ch’an Enlightenment,” meaning that he was enlightened in a mysterious way. And it was enlightenment which he maintained whether awake or asleep and which permeated even his deepest dreams for the first time since he had begun.
So he went to see master Yuan-wu, but only to be rebuked again. Before he could say a thing, master Yuan-wu just kept on repeating “No, no.” He then tossed him a koan, “The same as ‘is’ and ‘isn’t’ relying on a sesame plant”. Ta-hui thought he had a perfect answer for this one, but once again went down in defeat.
“No, no, you idiot. That’s not what I’m thinking about. Go back and study harder” replied the master.
So Ta-hui went back and poured his everything into study. And finally he made the total breakthrough. But it was because of his confrontation with master Yuan-wu that he continued to study to the point where it consumed even his sleep. Master Yuan-wu had said, in regard to his inability to maintain during deep sleep, “How pathetic. You died during your sleep, but never came back to life.”
When you have rid yourself of all delusions and can maintain even during your sleep, you come to a point when you die. But from there you have to come back to life. And how do you do that? Only by continuing to work with your koan.
There is an old saying, “Not maintaining in your sleep is a great disease.” Still, just maintaining during your sleep is not enough to become aware of your Buddha nature because you still have not solved your koan. It is from that point that you must come alive again, and then become enlightened while maintaining your koan at this point, the Eye opens.
I’ve talked a bit about the Chinese Ch’an masters, so let me now turn a bit to a great Korean master.
One of the great Korean Zen masters was Tae-go,14 the First patriarch of the Korean lineage of Lin-chi. It was after about 20 years of study, at the age of 40, that he reached the point of maintaining while both awake and asleep, and soon thereafter he made the final breakthrough.
After this enlightenment, however, he was not pleased with what he saw among the Sangha. There was no one to officially recognize him, and no one who knew what he had experienced. So he went to China where he became involved with the Lin-chi school, and he brought it back with him to Korea. He was properly enlightened, and he taught properly. Everything he taught can be summed up in this one sentence of his:

Even when you enter the stage of maintaining while awake and asleep, the most important thing is not to release your koan from your heart.

When you reach the stage of constantly maintaining even in a deep sleep, you have made it to the eighth level of sainthood; but you still have not solved your koan.
So as I said before, these people who cannot even maintain through dreams and who walk around saying that they have solved their koan are suffering from a serious illness.
But if you bring some super medicine to a dying person, telling him that he will live if he takes it, and he refuses to take it and dies, what can you do? If you bring a platter full of delicacies to a starving person and he refuses to eat and dies, not eyen the Buddha can save him. Ananda served the Buddha for 30-odd years, but if he didn’t do his own studying, what good was it?
To summarize, all the contents of the Tri-pitaka are contained in the Chinese character for mind. It’s as simple as that. If you open the Eye, you will understand everything, and you will see all the Buddhas of the past, present and future. To open the Eye is to see your true self, to realize your Buddha nature. And the quickest way to do this is through study with the koan.
The koan is something that you don’t understand even at the stage of maintaining during all waking and sleeping hours. Even if you think you have found it but cannot maintain during dreams and during deep sleep, then you haven’t solved your koan. You haven’t realized your Buddha nature, and you haven’t opened the Eye.
So we take for a standard whether or not you maintain during deep sleep. And during this maintaining, you must hold steadfast to your koan until you die and come alive again. I hope many of you succeed in this quest. Let’s all do our very best to open the Eye and to reach the wisdom of Buddhahood.

* Notes
1. Past, present and future.
2. One first experiences 51 levels of Bodhisattva development before Buddhahood: the stage of faith (10 levels), the stage of wisdom (10 levels), the stage of action (10 levels), the stage of transferring merit (10 levels) , the stage of sainthood (10 levels) , and the one level of universal Enlightenment. This is followed by the 52nd and final level, that of Supreme Enlightenment, or Buddhahood.
3. The storehouse, or store-consciousness.
4. T’ang dynasty, ?-949.
5. The title given to Chi-nul (Koryo dynasty, 1150-1210) posthumously.
6. T’ang dynasty, 780-841.
7. T’ang dynasty, 807-869.
8. 980-1050.
9. 1060-1l17.
10. T’ang dynasty, 885-958.
11. 1063-1135.
12. Sung dynasty, 1088-1163.
13. 1061-1l15.
14. Koryo dynasty, 1301-1382; founder of the Chogye Order.

Who is the thief wearing my noble robes and selling Buddha,
only to plant his own seeds of suffering?

In the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, the Buddha said that anyone who shaved his head, wore the noble robes, pretended to be a monk and sold the Buddha for a living was a thief. And according to the Surangama Sutra, the Buddha said that those who became monks and wore the robes, and who, rather than striving to become enlightened and guiding all sentient beings, used monkhood as a means of livelihood―those people were not his followers, nor were they monks. They were all thieves.
Living as a monk in a temple and trying to live by the Teachings of the Buddha is not an easy task. But it is essential to at least attempt to live according to the Teachings. And even if one is not totally successful at it, he should at the very least not go against the Teachings.
We are reminded of the words from the Sutra of Forty-Two Verses: “It is difficult to be born as a human, and it is equally as difficult to hear the Teachings of the Buddha.” So it is highly fortunate to be born as a human and to become a monk. but even if one ultimately cannot succeed on the path of a monk and lead others as is his duty, he should never resort to this form of thievery.
If we call one who makes a living by selling the Buddha a thief, then what should we call the place where he lives? Certainly not a temple; rather, a robber’s den. And the Buddha? He has become an agent for the thieves since he is being sold by them.
Here in Korea we have a large number of temples and a considerable number of monks and nuns. It would be hard to figure out how many such thieves there are, how many temples have become robbers’ dens, and how many Buddhas are being used as agents. To fail in your study and to fail as a monk is to sink into a state of hell in itself. But to use the Buddha―the greatest teacher the universe will ever know―as a means of livelihood is an entirely different matter.
To think that it is the result of ones karma to become such a thief and that one is bound to go to a hell anyway may be one thing. But how can anybody dare to make a living as a thief by intentionally selling the Buddha? We must all do our utmost to be careful not to use the noble Buddha as such an agent.
You see, there are all kinds of ways of selling the Buddha. And perhaps the most common way is through misrepresenting what we call Buddhist offerings. There are some who play the mokt’ak to the tune of “Come to know the world of Buddha. He will give you direction, he will bestow blessings upon you. If you come and make offerings, you will receive all this and more.”
The mokt’ak is the essential instrument used in spreading the Dharma. It is claimed that even confucius said, “Become the mokt’ak of the world.” By that he meant that we should spread the Buddhist way around the world so that everyone will lead a wholesome and proper life.
In contemporary Korea, however, there are some temples where the mokt’ak is being used to make money. To play the mokt’ak before the Buddha for people who pray for longevity and blessings has become a business. And that is selling the Buddha.
Everyone is familiar with that type of thinking; what is most important is to correct it. But some are making the situation even worse. They know that this is wrong, yet they do not correct it and continue to play the mokt’ak to this same tune. we are supposed to make Buddhist offerings in the way that the Buddha said we should.
Christians suffice with just one book, their Bible. But Buddhist Sutras number over 80,000, and just to be able to listen to them all would be practically impossible in a single lifetime. The number of Tripitaka Koreana woodblocks at Haein-sa is 81’340. How can anyone expect to read all of them? How are we supposed to be able to understand Buddhism if such a task is all but impossible, if the number of Sutras is so great? Since we can’t possibly read all the Sutras, we have to rely on established theories of study based on tradition for an understanding of Buddhism.
The most representative of the Sutras, and the most precious as far as the words of the Buddha are concerned, are the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Lotus Sutra. These are the “kings” of the Sutras. And the Avatamsaka Sutra is deeper and broader in Buddhist truth than even the Lotus Sutra. But where would you get the time to read all 80 boolts of the Avatamsaka Sutra?
The best thing to do is to read “practices of the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra”2 from the Avatamsaka Sutra, since this is often referred to as “the condensed Avatamsaka” All fundamental Buddhist truths are contained in this scripture, and all codes of behavior for the Buddhist can be found there.
Concerning Buddhist offerings, we find in this section “Samantabhadra’s Broadly Cultivated Offerings of the Ten Great Vows.” Let me quote from this:

People think that the greatest offering to the Buddha is to gather enough things to fill the sky, to light a candle with a wick as high as Mt. Sumeru, to bring an oceanful of oils, and to bow endlessly before the innumerable Buddhas.

That certainly would be one of the greatest offerings possible, and there would be great merit involved. But even greater is the Buddhist offering of Dharma. There are seven forms of Dharma offerings3, and the greatest of these is that of helping all forms of life. The Buddha said that helping other sentient beings even for a second was infinitely greater than bringing everything you can to the Buddha in a temple, chanting and praying.
To make a comparison, which would you rather do―spend a lot of money to set up shop and make little profit, or spend a little money to set up shop and make a large profit? The common sense answer is obvious. It costs a lot to bring all kinds of offerings to the temple; but the rewards are negligible when compared to the offering of common good, of helping other sentient beings even for a moment. This is considerably less effort, and certainly much less expensive. The gains to be made by doing so, as opposed to making expensive temple offerings, are incalculable.
The Buddha said, “If you truly believe in me and wish to follow me, don’t bring money to lay before me and then pray for longevity and blessings. If you really believe in me, then practice my teachings.” He was saying, in other words, to help all forms of life. So you see, we must cultivate our offerings on a scale far beyond ourselves and far beyond the temple
We can find other examples of Buddhist offerings in the “practices of the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra” as well. The Buddha said, “To give a starving, dying puppy on the road a handful of cold rice is of much greater merit than making all kinds of temple offerings and infinitely bowing before a Buddha.” Think about it. The Buddha said that the only true offerings were helping all forms of life and that you become a true follower of Buddha only by doing so.
Nowadays, 1 constantly tell students to make offerings. Their immediate reaction is, “we don’t have much spending money, so how are we suppose to make offerings?” This reaction illustrates the magnitude of misunderstanding the meaning of genuine offerings.
Helping others physically, psychologically, and even materially are all Buddhist offerings. If we all resolve to make offerings in these three ways, then the world will be filled with Buddhist offerings. The only reason that we don’t is because we’re all lazy and selfish. But you must realize that you must make offerings in this way to achieve Buddhahood.
When we have student retreats at the monastery, the students do 3,000 prostrations before coming up to see me at paengnyon-am to receive their koan. I tell thern that before they start on their koan they should learn how to make genuine offerings. And their eyes get really big. They think that l’m suggesting that they should empty their pockets and start bowing before the Buddha. Then I explain to them, as I have to you, what true Buddhist offerings are. They are all quite pleased!

The Problem of Pride

In making such offerings, however, you haye to be careful of one thing, and that is pride. To make an offering in the way I have described, and then to boast about it ruins the offering completely.
There are a lot of people who make offerings for their own ego, for their own public relations campaigns. That is not an offering, however; it’s merely making your own publicity materials. We should not ruin our offerings with our mouths. The Buddhist way is to make offerings anonymously. And Jesus said, “Don’t let the left hand know what the right hand is doing” I’m glad that more and more young people today are listening to this kind of thinking. I get letters from students who say that they will make offerings this way for the rest of their lives.
Let me tell you a story that happened shortly after the Korean war. I was staying in a temple called Songju-sa outside the city of Masan. Hanging on the front of the Buddha Hall was a big banner that read “Mr. Yoon So-and-So Financed Buddha Hall Restoration.” I asked who this Mr. Yoon was, and they said he ran an herb medicine shop in Masan, and that he had paid for the entire restoration out of his tremendous faith. I asked when he might be coming, and they said that if he knew I were there he would come immediately.
The next day, Mr. Yoon showed up to greet me. I told him that everyone was praising his outstanding faith, and that I, too, had been impressed when I first read the banner. You could tell by the glimmer in his eyes that he just loved the praise.
I then told him, however, that the banner was in the wrong place. banners were for lots of people to see, and if he hung it up there in the mountains, few people would see it. I told him to take the banner the following day to masan where he should hang it up in front of the railroad station. He got the message.
There’s another temple where they completed a project first before soliciting donations. They erected a new memorial tablet first, and then put up a banner. Then they waited for the funds to come in, which didn’t happen. The tablet just sat there getting weatherbeaten.
The monk involved said, “Gee, guess I did it the worng way. But I didn’t know any different.”
I said, “Not knowing the differrnce is not the problrm. The problem is, how are you going to recifty the sitation?” He thought for a moment, took the banner down and tore it to pieces. He then set fire to it.
Once I gave a number of examples of these quiet offerings to students, and one student said, “Well, Sunim, you’re not making any offerings. Why are you telling us to?” May reply was that teaching how to make offerings was an offering in itself.
Even just 20 yeara ago there were hordes of poor people living on the outskirts of Seoul, Pusan and other major cities. Someone came to me who wanted to distribute food to these people, and he asked how he could go about this without anyone finding out.
I told him that first he should have a couple of people go to the area to do a survey and make a list of the needy. Then have a couple of other people go to the nearest rice shop, have tickets made, and arrange it so that the residents who brought tickets would get rice. Then have other people go around carrying rice to accact attention and distribute the tickets. Then have another group of people at the rice shop give rice to those who brought tickets and matched the list. If they kept changing the people all the time., no one would find out. I told him that if the residenta asked, the workers should merely reply that they were doing if for someone else.
At first, the needy didn;t believe that there was free rice, so they hesitated to go the shop. But after enough prodding, since the shop was close by, they went there and came home with rice. One day a kid coming home from school was heard to comment, “Somthing really weird is going on in our neigborhood. These strangers have come, they give rice tickets, and people are getting free rice so that they won’t go hungry. These strangers must have come from out of the sky!” there is always a way to remain anonymous.
Then once in Masan somebody anonymously provided a truckload of rice for the needy at the Harvest Moon Festival. The newspapers caught wind of it and wrote up a big story.
He came to see me, and I accused him of doing it intentionally to make headlines for himself. He insisted that it was not his intention, but that there was no way the reporters wouldn’t get wind of it. I told him that I was nevertheless suspicious of his motivations, and that he should have found a way of doing it so that he would have remained anonymous.
Many years ago there was an old benefactor in the countryside, and a youth of the village came to pay his respects to the man for his outstanding contributions. The youth said, “How noble you are! Being rich in itself is a great blessing, but what could be a greater blessing than sharing it with others?”
The man responded with, “You little creep! When did I ever help anybody? Helping somebody else is like having ringing ears. You know your ears are ringing, but nobody else does. Good works? Benevolence? What benevolence? If you’re going to talk about benevolence, get lost.”
This old benefactor is a perfect example of making true offerings. Helping others can be easy, or it can be difficult. But even more difficult is keeping quiet about it.
Women tend to be weaker physically and emotionally than men, and they like to chatter more. And it seems women like to brag more, too. I was asked why this was so, and my reply was that people carry weight according to their strength, and people wear clothing according to their height. Tall people have to have larger clothes, and shorter people have smaller clothes. This is equality. Strong people can exert their strength physically, but weaker people usually can only get on top of a situation by talking. So women have to be even more careful about bragging, especially about making offerings.

Buddhist Repentance, Prayer and Service

when Gandhi was in England, he studied Chrishanity and the Christian concept of love for fellow men. Later he studied Buddhism and discovered the Buddhist concept of love for all forms of life. He felt that although it was not proper to talk about other religions, if one made a comparison, Christianity was like a saucer of water and Buddhism was like an ocean.
The point is that Buddhism is not anthropocentric. It respects all forms of life. people, beasts, microbes-these are all subjects for Buddhist offerings. Helping all forms of life is the true Buddhist offering. It is genuine Buddhist practice, and it must become our personal practice. Only by doing so are we be able to avoid being classified as thieves by the Buddha.
After the Korean War, I spent some time at Pong-am-sa in the Mun-gyong area, and the late ven. Hyang-gok was staying there. He went to Pusan to deliver a Dharma lecture, and he talked about Buddhist offerings. He told the people assembled that a true offering was helping others, not playing the mokt’ak in a temple. He explained that a temple was the site where genuine offerings should be taught. He said that making offerings was something to be done outside of the temple, and he used examples from “Practices of the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra.” The people were quite delighted to hear all of this.
A few days after he returned to Pong-am-sa, a monk from Pusan came to see him. In those days the Chogye Sect had provincial organizations, and after ven. Hyang-gok had spoken in Pusan there evidently had been an emergency meeting at the Kyongnam provincial Chapter. The monk had quite a bit to say to Ven. Hyang-gok:
“I understand that you told the assembly that a temple was a place where people should learn how to make offerings outside the temple, and that true Buddhist offerings were done in the form of helping others. That amounts to telling them not to bring money to the temple. What are we monks supposed to do, starve to death? One monk was driven out of the temple and the place was in an uproar, all because of what you said. So please don’t ever say that again.”
A few days later, another monk came from the Chogye Headquarters in Seoul and said that in Seoul they had had a similar emergency meeting. Ven. Hyang-gok was quick in his response:
“Then what should I say instead? What you’re telling the people is that you have the powers of Buddha, so the more money they offer, the greater the blessings they’ll receive. Do you want me to go around saying things that will increase your income? Do you think you’re going to live for a thousand years, forever? It seems to me that sometime you’re going to die. What do you have against dying while teaching the words of the Buddha? Seems to me that that would be a rather glorious way to go. I don’t care what anyone else says―the only thing important to me is transmitting the Teachings. That’s all I can do, so leave me alone, and do as you like.”
You asked me to come here to speak to you today, and what do I do but give you a quick course on how to starve to death! You’re a bit worried, aren’t you?!
I’m sure there are other temples, not just Haein-sa, where people worry about this. But I’ve always tried to make what I think is an important point. It’s up to you whether you believe in Christianity or Buddhism or Taoism or nothing. But if you believe in Christianity, then you believe in Jesus, in what he taught and what he represents, and not just in the priest or minister. It’s the same with Buddhism-you’re supposed to believe in the Buddha, his Teachings, and what he represents, not just in the monks. If you believe just in the official representatives of a religion, you might wind up in a living hell rather than in heaven or paradise.
What I am telling today are not my own thoughts; I’m just transmitting to you what the Buddha said, so it’s okay for you to believe me!
You all know the old saying that if you’re pointing at the moon, you should see the moon, and not just your finger.
A monk is someone who learns the Teachings of the Buddha and who teaches how to make Buddhist offerings. A temple is a place where people are supposed to learn how to make genuine offerings. The subjects for your offerings are outside the temple, not inside. The subjects for offerings are not the temple Buddhas, but all living Buddhas outside the temple. We must cultivate our offerings on a broad scale, and that is how Buddhist offerings should be directed.
Monks should not be playing the mokt’ak and having people make offerings for longevity and blessings in front of the temple Buddha. Helping all forms of life is the only genuine Buddhist offering. we must understand this thoroughly, and we must practice it diligently. Only then will Buddhism start to grow new sprouts. I’d like to make some simple comparisons between Christianity and Buddhisrn because 1 think we have some things to learn from each another.
As far as doctrine is concerned, Buddhism and Christianity are beyond comparison, and quite a few scholars are coming to feel that way, too. Schopenhauer once said something to the effect that to compare Christianity to Buddhism was like throwing an egg at a boulder. And this is closer to the truth than it is an exaggeration, at least as far as doctrine is concerned. But today in Korea, in practice, it’s just the opposite.
The core of Mahayana Buddhism is selfless compassion for all that lives. But how many monks actually have this true sense of compassion? How many monks are actually helping others? In current terminology, this sense of compassion has been replaced by the word “service.” And it seems to me that monks have the least sense of service, while Christians are really doing a great deal of service. Let me give you an example.
I read an article somewhere about a place called Carmel Convent. On New Year’s Day, everyone drew lots for people who were in difficult straits―old folks, orphans, prisoners, and so on. If a person picked an old folks, home, that person had to pray for those people all day long each day for a full year. The same for someone who drew an orphanage or a prison. Their entire lives are centered around praying for others, not for themselves. This is the very basis of prayer, and these people are truly religious people. And how do they manage to live? They sell homemade candies and poultry for a living. They make their own livelihood, and pray only for others.
Well, what about Buddhism? If we must draw lines, Theravadins are basically concerned with their own enlightenment, while Mahayanists are sulpposed to live selflessly for all forms of life. And the real basis of Buddhism is Mahayana, not Theravadin. Yet few actually practice the mahayana way here in Korea. Those people in the convent rnake their own living but live for others. It’s not that there aren’t Buddhists like that today, but it seems that they are considerably fewer in number.
I’m not saying that we are supposed to follow the example of the Christians, because our doctrines are considerably different as are some of our methodologies. What I am saying, however, is that compassion for all forms of life is the very basis of Buddhism, and practicing this compassion is the genuine Buddhist offering around which we must center our very lives. And we must not think of it as “service,” “self-sacrifice,” or “love.” It should be done spontaneously, naturally and without a thought of the self, just as a mother cares for a child. If you applied medicine to a cut on your arm, would you consider that service or self-sacrifice or love? Of course not. In the same way, you should serve all forms of life.
Not too long ago a student came to see me at paengnyon-am, and I asked her what she thought about when she prostrated. Her response was that she was prostruting in hopes of becoming a person who helped others. I then asked her why she was going around in circles. “Don’t prostrate in hopes of becoming someone who helps others. Go out and make all forms of life happy, and then prostrate. And when you do prostrate, do it for all forms of life. That is quite different from prostrating just to become a person who helps others.”
The point is not to prostrate thoughtlessly. The point is to do everything, beginning with the first prostration, for all forms of life. And the next step is to pray for them every morning.
I make people who come to see me regularly do 108 prostrations before we meet. If you really want to help others, you should do 108 prostrations every morning, and do them for others. I, too, do 108 prostrations each morning. The condition is that, from the very start, I do not prostrate for myself. When you prostrate, recite a prayer from The 108 prastrations of Repentance

Now that I have become religiously aware, I am worshipping, but not in the hopes of blessings for myself, nor to be liberated and sent to paradise. I am worshipping with the hope that all sentient beings will be enlightened simultaneously, and I transfer all personal rnerit to this end.

You should both repent for and pray for all sentient beings, for all others. There is considerable rnerit in this, and this merit should also be transferred to all sentient beings. This transfer of merit is essential to the mahayana way. So you should add to your prayer:

And should there be any remaining merit, let none of it come to me. may it all be transferred to the Incomparable Eternal Dharma.

This exemplifies the Mahayana attitude of complete altruism. These methods of repentance and transference were developed in India, came through China, and firmly rooted themselves in Korea’s Shilla and Koryo dynasties. This was also practiced in all temples in China until communization. one doesn’t repent for one’s own misdoings, but for the misdeeds of all sentient beings and on behalf of all sentient beings. Then one prays for all sentient beings and transfers any and all personal merit to them all. This should be a basic attitude for all Buddhists. It should be their sense of mission, their very duty.
We also have another problem related to the Ven. Hyang-gok episode. Someone once asked me, “Sunim, you’re really frustrating me. I am the one who is hungry, and you’re telling me to go around feeding others? Am I supposed to starve to death?”
The principle of cause-and-effect is not something which applies only to Buddhists. It is basic universal law. If you plant green beans, you get green beans. If you plant red beans, you get red beans. If you sow good, you reap good, and if you sow misdeeds, you reap retribution.
Illness, poverty and all other forms of torment are retribution for previous misdoings, but people wonder what misdoings. Of course the average person has no recollection now, but all of these things are the culmination of your previous Karma in both this life and others. Present sufferings are for misdoings in the past.
On the other hand, good returns from good. So if you do good now, it will return to you in the future. Such things as helping others and praying for others will all return to you sometime in some form. So by praying for others, you’re actually praying for yourself in the same way that if you harm others, you’re actually harming yourself. And even if you do not wish to reap the rewards of helping others, there’s no way around it-merit will come to you. someone who helps to feed others is not going to starve. I think that the problem is that people, out of personal insecurities, are just arfaid of making that kind of commitment. They worry about their own stomachs first. But that is not the Mahayana way.
This is a very important point. If you pray for others in your daily life and help them, they become happy. And following this universal principle of cause-and-effect, all of this happiness will return to you.
You can see the same principle at work in biology and in ecology. If something is about to attack something else, it often becomes victimized first. Everything comes back to you sooner or later. If you don’t care for your crops, you’re the one who winds up hungry. So don’t worry about whether you’re going to starve to death if you feed others first. use your energy to make offerings in the way that the Buddha taught.
Let me make this point with another story. Once there was a man who didn’t know how to make true offerings and whose life was filled with wrongdoings, so he went to a hell. At the gate he looked inside and saw others in terrible torment, and he had to close his eyes at this unbearable sight. Most people in the same situation would think, “This is awful. If I go in there, I’ll have to suffer the same way. How can I get out of this one?”
This man thought otherwise, however. He wondered if there were any way in which he could, even for just a few minutes, be tormented instead so that these sufferers could have a reprieve. He wondered if there was any way that he could alleviate their torment. At the very instant he had this genuine thought, the hell disappeared and he found himself in paradise. If you think good, then goodness, even paradise appears before you.
Nowadays a lot of people are doing all kinds of good works, but there are many monks in the mountains who are not so active in such service because of their intense training. So I have one request. Lets following the Teachings of the Buddha, and make true Buddhist offerings whenever and wherever we can. And at the pre-dawn service, lets add a simple line to our prayers:

May all that lives be happy,
May all that lives be happy,
May all that lives be happy.

If you chant this line three times every morning, you’ll feel something inexpressible. And whether you prostrate once, or twice or a thousand times, do it for all sentient beings. Help all sentient beings, and pray for all sentient beings. You have to become sorneone who lives selflessly for all sentient beings. Otherwise you become one of those thieves that the Buddha was talking about. So let’s all rnake broadly cultivated, genuine Buddhist offerings together.

Dharmas are neither produced nor extinguished.
If you are aware of this, then all Buddhas are constantly before you.

This is a quote from the Avatamsaka Sutra. It is the very marrow of buddhism, sums up all of the Teachings of the Buddha, and is the very basis of Buddhism. If you should ask what it was that the Buddha became enlightened about, this is the answer. All the other Teachings of the Buddha are detailed explanations based around this one.
Most people think, however, that everything is mortal, that everything which is born must die. In fact, Buddhism teaches you that there is a continual cycle of birth, aging, suffering, and death. And if this is so, how could the Buddha say that all dharmas are neither produced nor extinguished? What is not mortal? We are surrounded by life that must die; so we wonder why the Buddha said this, and what he meant by it.
If you come to understand this one truth that all dharmas are neither produced nor extinguished, you will found the way, and there is nothing more to know. But it is coming to understand this truth that is so difficult, so everyone doubts the validity of the statement.
If it is true that all dharmas are neither produced nor extinguished, then what is the universe like? It’s the constantly abiding, the eternal. And this universe which is neither produced nor extinguished is called in Buddhism “the eternal Dharma realm,” “the constantly abiding realm.”
Let me quote the Lotus Sutra for you:

Since Dharma is always in its place,
the mundane world is also constantly abiding.

“Dharma” here is referring to this law of non-producing, non-extinguishing. The heavens of the Devas and the realms of the earthlings are all part of this non-producing, non-extinguishing. Everything is constantly abiding.
Everything appears to the eye to be in a process of birth and death, but that is not the actual case. It is a superficial observation. Actually, the entire universe is constantly abiding and indestructible. In Buddhism we call this Dharmakaya, the ultimate, the reality underlying all things. In the Avatamsaka Sutra, this is also referred to as unlimited causation, the unlimited influence of every thing on all things and all things on every thing. Everything is endlessly intertwined. And that is what is neither produced nor extinguished. Everything is harmoniously integrated in the universe. Regardless of the sometimes kaleidoscopic changes we see, everything is constantly abiding and eternal.
So by realizing this, you come to understand Buddhisrn and all your problems concerning Buddhism are solved. But if you don’t come to this realization, then you’ll never understand what Buddhism is all about.
People then naturally raise another question. If everyone is to make this realization, doesn’t that mean that everyone should go to a temple in the mountains, meditate and follow the path in the traditionally prescribed manner? That, of course, is highly unlikely. For those who cannot clearly understand this truth, however, let’s turn to modern science for a moment for an explanation. After all, isn’t this the age of science? But what does science have to do with “non-producing, non-extinguishing”?
There are innumerable philosophies and religions in this world of ours. But no other system has dealt with this non-producing, non-extinguishing issue so clearly and firmly as Buddhism. I guess you’d have to say that the historical Buddha has the copyright on this one! But science, evidently, has been trying to claim the copyright in recent decades.
How so? Through experiments, atomic physics has proved that nature is “non-producing, non-extinguishing.” Albert Einstein was the first to bring this to light in his Special Theory of Relativity.
Nature has two forms as perceived in traditional physics-energy and mass. In Einstein’s special theory, however, he stated that energy is mass and that mass is a form of energy. It was also explained that energy conserves itself; that is to say, energy never loses any of itself, it never decreases. And mass was thought to have remained unchanged as well in the sense that none of it ever got lost. Nowadays, however, energy and mass are no longer considered separate, and consequently they are both included in this same law of conservation.
Exploration of mass led to the discovery of molecules and subatomic particles; and energy is formless motion. But how could mass, a form, be interchangeable with something formless? Such a thing was inconceivable. So at the time of Einstein’s discovery, everyone thought that he was out of his mind.
Einstein certainly started lots of people thinking, and some people working. In the decades to follow, Einstein’s special theory has been proved innumerable times. Mass is a form of energy, energy is mass, and they are mutually convertible. And the first applications were, unfortunately, the atomic and hydrogen bombs.
Converting mass is called nuclear fission, and a tremendous amount of energy is released by this fission of atoms― that’s what we get with the atomic bombs. We can get similar results with nuclear fusion; by combining hydrogen and helium, we get hydrogen bombs. So through science, man has proved that energy and mass are mutually convertible, but man have proved it in a very disastrous manner. C. D. Anderson was the first physicist to succeed with these experiments of conversion, but his successes were not extensive. Then there was Emilio Segre of Italy who fled from Mussolini to the U.S. He was highly successful in a broad range of experiments of converting energy to mass and mass to energy.
Let’s make an easy analogy, one of water and ice. If water freezes, it becomes ice, but the water is not gone. In the same way, if the ice melts, is the ice gone? No. It has only converted itself into water. Water appears as ice, and ice appears as water. The water is ice, and the ice is water.
It`s the same with energy and mass. Energy appears as mass, and mass appears as energy– they are one and the same. This came to light first in the Special Theory of Relativity, but it also applies to quantum theory which eventually followed the efforts of Einstein.
What happens during such conversion? We think that when water becomes ice, the water is gone and ice has been produced. But actually the water is not gone; it has just transformed itself (non-extinguishing). And ice has not really been produced (non-producing) ; water has only changed form, converting into something else. This is a good example of non-producing, non-extinguishing.
It’s the same with energy and mass. They mutually convert, but there is not even the slightest increase or decrease in volume; and here we have the Buddhist “non-increasing, non-decreasing,” which is actually another way of saying “non-producing, non-extinguishing.”
Japanese physicists, well aware of traditional Buddhist thought and such teachings as “non-producing, non-extinguishing,” “non-increasing, non-decreasing,” were not surprised by such discoveries in atomic physics and quantum theory. But Western physicists, unfamiliar with Buddhist thought and terminology, thought that they had found something astounding. In fact, they had merely discovered what the Buddha had said so very long ago. The difference is merely in terminology.
The law of conservation specifies that there is no loss of either energy or mass. Again, this verifies the world of non-producing, non-extinguishing, non-increasing, non-decreasing. In Buddhism, this is the eternal Dharma realm. The Special Theory of Relativity makes the point that the universe is eternal, which in Buddhism is the constantly abiding realm, the eternal Dharma realm. Nature is composed of energy and mass which are non-producing, non-extinguishing, non-increasing, non-decreasing.
This is not to say, however, that “non-producing, non-extinguishing” would be a lie or a fantasy if Einstein had not presented his Special Theory of Relativity. With his eyes of wisdom, the Buddha became enlightened to this very fact that the universe is constantly abiding. It is, however, interesting to note that for thousands of years most people were unable to comprehend the meaning of this, and that it has taken science in this century to make it easier to understand for the average person.
Nowadays we hear a lot of people say that Buddhism is too difficult to comprehend, so I have taken the special theory of relativity to make Buddhism’s fundamental teaching a bit clearer for you, and I hope that it is of some help in your understanding.
Many people say that they really don’t know much about Buddhism, and that it seems too lofty, too deep, and too vast for them to comprehend. They think it seems too irrelevant to be compatible with modernity, and that you have about as much chance of understanding it as you do of getting a stroke of lightening to cook you a bean. But it is not all that difficult if you understand its basic foundation of non-producing, non-extinguishing in terms of the examples I have used.
In The Heart Sutra, we have another important phrases:

Form is no different from emptiness,
Emptiness is no different from form.
Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.

This is another seemingly unsolvable riddle. How can form be emptiness? For example, can emptiness become a rock and can a rock become emptiness? No, of course they can’t become each other. Because they already are each other.
Take a rock as an example. lt is composed of molecular configurations, and the molecules are composed of atoms, which in turn are composed of electrons and neutrons, and particles. It is precisely these subatomic particles, however, which prove that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. In both nature and in experiments, when these particles are destroyed through collision, their masses can be transformed into kinetic energy. Matter is energy, and energy is matter, and they are constantly alternating. A rock is solid form to us, but it is composed, ultimately, of these subatomic particles which are constantly shifting bundles of energy. When they appear, we have form, and when they disappear, we have emptiness. So now you understand why, in Buddhism, we don’t talk about objects; rather, we talk about constantly changing events.
The deeper we investigate, the greater the proof of the validity of the Teachings.
People also speak of four-dimensional space-time continuum, another point brought up by the theory of relativity. Minkowski was first to present a mathematical formula to prove the point. In a lecture on the subject after completing the formula, he said something to the effect that existence transcends time and space, and that time and space could no longer be treated as separate entities. He felt that the age was coming when the two would be perceived as one.
Time and space cannot be considered as separate. If I say, “Today at Haein-sa…,” both concepts of “today” in time and “Haein-sa” in space are included. We are right here today, and we couldn`t be anywhere else at the same time. Previously, three-dimensional space was considered separate from time, as we tend to think in daily life. But they are not separate; they are united in a world which is now called the four-dimensional continuum.
So?
In the Avatamsaka Sutra, we have another term, “the all-pervading Dharma realm” in which time and space are completely syncretized. This is what Minkowski was talking about, but he used a mathematical formula to prove the existence of this four-dimensional continuum.
I have covered “non-producing, non-extinguishing,” “non-increasing, non-decreasing” and the all-pervading Dharma realm. And these are what we are talking about when we talk of the Buddha’s Middle Way. When the Buddha gave his first sermon at the Deer Park after Enlightenment, among his first words were, “I have found Middle Way.” So this is where Buddhism begins.
The Middle Way is the art of syncretizing all contradictions. Usually people think in terms of “good” and “bad.” But The Middle Way is transcending these dualities. By transcending dualities, however, what do you have, “not good” and “not evil”? No. You have good and evil which are mutually convertible. Good is evil and evil is good, and they mutually convert. Think of this in terms of the interchange of form and formlessness.
The Middle Way is coming to see that everything is already syncretized, already united as one. Contradictions and dualities are transcended, and everything flows together just as energy and mass flow as one. There is a common misconception, however, that The Middle Way is a middle path between two extremes, which it is not. It is transcending such contradictions as “producing” and “extinguishing.” It integrates them so that producing is extinguishing and extinguishing is producing. when energy converts to mass, is energy extinguished and mass produced? No. Extinguishing is producing and producing is extinguishing. The extinguishing of energy is the producing of mass, and the extinguishing of mass is the producing of energy. They are syncretized and they are and one the same.
Let me talk about dualities for a moment in terms of being and non-being. The Middle Way is neither being nor non-being (“not being, not non-being”). It transcends being and non-being. Yet being and non-being exist (“also being, also non-being”). In other words, being and non-being as perceived on the three-dimensional level are syncretized on the four-dimensional continuum where they are mutually convertible. The Buddha said that The Middle Way was this syncretizing of being and non-being. At this level, being is non-being and non-being is being. Go back to “non-producing, non-extinguishing,”– they are not separate, but rather different forms of each other. The same with being and non-being. On the three-dimensional level, they are seen as dualities; on the four-dimensional continuum, they are syncretized into one and the same. Consequently, everything is unobstructed and free-flowing.
This has always been difficult for people to comprehend, and people thought the meaning was as elusive as a cloud in the sky. But the Special Theory of Relativity has made it much easier to grasp than a drifting cloud. Nowadays, however, there are few who try to grasp this and even fewer who actually do. And some people try to equate The Middle Way with Hegelian dialectical materialism, but dialectical materialism includes the contradiction of a separate time process, whereas in Buddhism all contradictions, dualities and opposites are integrated into one on the four-dimensional continuum.
So being is non-being, and non-being is being; right is wrong, and wrong is right. By applying this Middle Way, all arguments and conflicts, struggles and contradictions disappear. There is not a single reason for quarreling. And that is the state of paradise, of heaven, of the world of the Absolute. So we have, as 1 mentioned earlier from the Lotus Sutra:

Since Dharma is always in its place,
The mundane world is also constantly abiding.

You see, although we perceive the world as being filled with things which are being produced and being extinguished, this is not so in fundamental reality. Fundamental reality is the constantly abiding, the eternal, the state of non-producing and non-extinguishing.
Now you may ask where this principle of non-producing, non-extinguishing came from. It didn’t come from anywhere― the universe is non-producing, non-extinguishing. It is constantly abiding. If you come to understand the perfect oneness of everything through this “non-producing, non-extinguishing,” if you come to realize it fully and live accordingly, then you have no need of paradise or heaven. Wherever you are is the world of the Absolute.
Buddhism claims that all forms of life are absolute. If you open the Eyes in the way I have described, then you will come to see that this temporal world is in fact paradise. So you have no need to seek it elsewhere. Just try to open the Eyes. You will see that the sun brightens the entire universe. when you see this fundamental reality, do you need to chant to get to paradise, do you need to believe in Jesus to get to heaven? Wherever you are is paradise, heaven, the world of the Absolute.
The difference is this: if you open the Eyes, you are in the absolute world of non-producing, non-extinguishing; but if the Eyes are closed, you live in the world of producing and extinguishing, the world of life and death, the world of relative dualism, the darkness of the middle of the night.
I hope that today’s discourse will help all of you to open the Eyes completely. Let’s all try our best to accomplish this together.